Festival Plaza: Top 5 Ways to Improve It
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Introduction
The Festival Plaza (FP) in the Generation 7 Pokémon games is the spiritual successor to the Player Search System (PSS) that was first introduced in Pokémon X and Y (XY), the first installments of Generation 6, and carried over to Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire (ORAS) later on. The FP, much like the former PSS, was intended to function as a literal general hub for online activities, including direct trades and battles with other players, both registered friends and random passersby, as well as the Global Trade System (GTS) and Wonder Trade (WT). While both the FP and the PSS share these qualities and features, Game Freak decided to take a step further in Generation 7, and players are now able to unlock helpful booths for their plazas, including food stalls that will help raise the levels of Pokémon, lottery shops with a range of useful prizes, bouncy houses that help with EV training, haunted houses that reward Pokémon that are brave enough to enter them with other useful prizes, and fortune-teller tents and various goody shops with items that will help Trainers during their journey.
However, a lot of players have been complaining about the FP, and, in the following article, I will try to analyze where the FP's shortcomings lie as well as why and how certain solutions would optimize the experience. In that sense, let us not go around in circles further and clear the ring for the festival without further ado!
1. Communication
Ah yes, you are about to battle one of your friends online, you are about to help a friend evolve their Kadabra or their Haunter, or you want to hatch a shiny Egg for a fellow Pokémaniac shiny collector from one of the online communities. You can see their in-game name in your list of current FP visitors, and you send them the request. Some time passes, and your partner seems to have ignored the request, even though both of you appear to be ready and online at the time you had scheduled for. You try to contact your partner via your community's messaging system or chatroom, only to realize that both of you have been trying to send your requests simultaneously. While the PSS's visual and audible alerts in the form of a beeping sound and a textbox draw your attention to an incoming request, the FP unfortunately has no way of informing the players about incoming requests while both of them watch their timed sent requests expire, hoping for the respective other player to accept. The FP should have included a notification system, preventing FP users from wasting their time and from being left wondering why their partners keep ignoring their requests.
2. Navigation
Subject to the same conditions, the FP no longer uses the customizable player icons from the PSS that you were able to click on when specifically searching for a specific player. Instead, you have to open a list with player names that you constantly have to manually update by pressing the "X" button until the name you were looking for finally pops up. Not only was this an automated process of the PSS, but you were also able to stay in the main interface, preventing you from accidentally missing an incoming trade or battle request. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the FP unfortunately only allows you to focus on one thing at a time. This is yet another "downgrade" in the sense of failing to promote the successful communication among players that is ultimately supposed to be its main objective. More often than not, both players either send simultaneous requests to each other, wondering why the person at the other end keeps ignoring it, or find themselves wasting time while waiting / hoping for the other person to send the request. This chaos could have easily been prevented by having kept the aforementioned old PSS notification popup feature. Instead of the old Trainer icons, they could have let us use the customizable photo from our Trainer Passports.
3. Accessibility
The following point is more about a "missed opportunity" as opposed to a "downgrade" like in the previous two paragraphs. Back in Generation 6, collectors of shiny Pokémon, specifically the ones looking for TSV / ESV matches, were able to comfortably trade Pokémon Eggs among each other and hatch them on the spot without having to go offline, re-connect, and go through the aforementioned tedious process of finding the right player again and successfully sending / accepting the request. As you may have noticed, "inconvenience" and "disruption" and "miscommunication" are unfortunately recurrent motifs when it comes to the FP. While the PSS used to occupy the touchscreen area of your console on the previous generation, the FP is isolated from the main game and occupies both screens of your console in the current generation. Instead of letting the Rotom Dex hog all of the touch screen, having kept the PSS on the touch screen and separating it from the FP and its related booths that are mainly useful for offline play would have been a significant improvement.
4. General Hub
Since I already discussed the point that a separate PSS and a separate FP with useful features for offline play would have been the better option in the previous paragraph, I welcome the opportunity to explain how it could have been improved even further for offline play. While we have a vast range of useful booths, some of which I already mentioned earlier in the introduction of this article, I think that they could have added a few more default booths in order to really house everything in the same place. Such booths would, for example, include generally useful NPCs like the Name Rater, the Masseuse, the fully invested EV checker, the happiness checker, and both the Move Deleter and the Move Reminder. Instead of them being scattered all across the Alola region, you would have them all conveniently gathered in the same place, saving you quite a lot of time.
5. Battle Agency
And last but not least, we have the Battle Agency (BA), an FP feature that was added in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon (USUM), the second installment of the Generation 7 games. This feature allows you to pick one of three Pokémon with movesets from the Alola region's Battle Tree (BT) facility and to team up with other players to rank up and win a considerable amounts of points that you can spend on items and services provided in the booths. The BA itself is a fun idea, and the most appealing part of the challenge consists in the "Switcheroo" booths that let you borrow a variety of Pokémon with interesting movesets three times a day. While it is undeniably a good thing that great emphasis was placed on keeping the experience as diversified as possible, there are still a couple of obstacles that could have been avoided. The BA requires you to do a lot of grinding to increase your rank, and, in order to progress, you need teammates of an equally high rank to maximize your chances of winning. Even if you find powerful Trainers that you can team up with, they only stay available for a certain amount of time before both of you have to be online again at the exact same time to refresh said availability. So, unless you are a member of a community that schedules times for this, your chances of finding appropriate teammates can turn out to be very slim. While there is a cast of Festival Plaza Fan NPC Trainers that you can use if not enough human players are available, Game Freak unfortunately decided to lock these to Grade 0 (Level 50). In this sense, having these NPC Trainers locked to your own, current Grade would have been a significant improvement. This would for example have been consistent with how the BT facility lets you recruit AI Trainers that you can team up with in the Super Multis format when no real players from your local entourage are available. This idea would make sense, since the AI trainers in both facilities run the exact same sets on their Pokémon!
Conclusion
In conclusion, Game Freak has become notorious over the years for introducing good features in one generation to replace them with inferior versions or get rid of them entirely in the next generation. We will have to see what the future holds for us in the upcoming Sword and Shield games that are only a couple of months away. Will Game Freak decide to continue going in circles à la Festival Plaza, or will they shield themselves from the proverbial double-edged sword and listen to the criticism of their audience?
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