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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
i actually think that in concept, the ai reading your moves isnt that bad. i dont think it should be on at all times but itd be a more effective way to code "prediction". i think something funny they should do is that if someone tries to pp stall the trainer with switching pokemon back and forth it should activate a mode where the ai knows exactly what youre doing for 5 turns. i want nuzlockers to lose their mons for it
For reasons unknown to man or God, GF loves evasion strategies, especially around Gens 3-4. They couldn't get enough of it. For reference, the Bright Powder appears no less than 80 times in the list of Pokemon in Emerald's Frontier, which to my knowledge is tied with the Lum Berry and the Focus Band for the most common item in the Frontier - and many of these Bright Powder mons are paired with Double Team.
Someone rated this post of mine from a while back, which reminded me
that the Teraleak outright confirmed this theory of mine, with clarification that the anti-Xereneas form was planned to be a predatory animal like a wolf or big cat, and the anti-Yveltal form was planned to be a hunter with some sort of anti-air weapon(likely a bow due to the nature of Thousand Arrows). Sounds like both were heavily retooled into 10% and Complete Zygarde
Gens 3 and 4 don’t just love evasion-boosting moves, they also love status spam. In regular trainer battles, this is because they aren’t meant to be challenging on a consistent basis, but 1-2 fights will be tough because you get paralyzed 5 times or hit yourself in confusion for an accidental KO.
And there is counter play to all this. There are moves and abilities that prevent evasion-decreases and buff accuracy, there are X-accuracy items. I think part of this is semantics where certain status conditions feel more legitimate than others, ie evasion and sleep can take away 4-5 turns in a row, but the former feels cheaper. (Obv that’s not a perfect comparison but stuff like evasion and confusion feels cheap).
I do think in-game these days, due to power creep, the AI suffers more because the human player is going to choose 3-4 strong attacking moves, while the AI learnset will be worse, not able to take advantage of support moves well, and not able to switch around the attacks. These things have always been issues but now that the human players have more tools available to them through Power Creep it’s worse.
And GameFreak compensates by making you fight more overpowered bosses like in Tera Raids
On this note tho from what little I’ve gleaned from skimming Wolfey videos, evasion spam and OHKO moves are becoming popular in VGC which seems like a really bad thing, and I got mad about it last night in some sort of connection with how GameFreak doesn’t let old gen Pokemon keep their moves when transferred up.
And there is counter play to all this. There are moves and abilities that prevent evasion-decreases and buff accuracy, there are X-accuracy items. I think part of this is semantics where certain status conditions feel more legitimate than others, ie evasion and sleep can take away 4-5 turns in a row, but the former feels cheaper. (Obv that’s not a perfect comparison but stuff like evasion and confusion feels cheap).
I do think in-game these days, due to power creep, the AI suffers more because the human player is going to choose 3-4 strong attacking moves, while the AI learnset will be worse, not able to take advantage of support moves well, and not able to switch around the attacks. These things have always been issues but now that the human players have more tools available to them through Power Creep it’s worse.
And GameFreak compensates by making you fight more overpowered bosses like in Tera Raids
On this note tho from what little I’ve gleaned from skimming Wolfey videos, evasion spam and OHKO moves are becoming popular in VGC which seems like a really bad thing, and I got mad about it last night in some sort of connection with how GameFreak doesn’t let old gen Pokemon keep their moves when transferred up.
Good point! Adding on to this, the typical casual player would often be underlevelled in earlier games, but from Gen 5 onwards mechanics were introduced to make sure you'd keep up. Evasiveness strats and status spam might have been a little more common in Gens 3-4, but I think what makes them stick out in those games is that battles take longer, so you have to land more hits to get through them.
Incidentally, I reckon this is also why those 'I was juuust about to win but then they used a Full Restore' memes basically died out after Gen 4: the Champion healing their ace back up to 100% used to represent like 5 turns of chip damage, erased in the blink of an eye, but now it's 1-2 turns at most.
I think what makes Evasion feel so much cheaper than Sleep or Paralyze is two factors: you are much less likely to have an explicit countermeasure to Evasion (status healing items or berries are common loot to find vs X Accuracy relative to how often you use them); you have more direct control over putting up with a Status (switching out or at least knowing you're taking a turn on Sleep if you don't heal it) vs Evasion just being something the opponent whips out and forces you to coin flip.
Additionally on Sleep specifically, there's at least some upper limit to how long you can stay out on one use, whereas Evasion rolls independently whether you've missed 1 time or 10 times.
Additionally on Sleep specifically, there's at least some upper limit to how long you can stay out on one use, whereas Evasion rolls independently whether you've missed 1 time or 10 times.
I'm pretty sure that it's because Evasion can never wall a player. It sucks and is annoying, but an enemy who clicks Double Team 6 times in a row isn't attacking you, so with enough save-and-resets, eventually the player will win. If you're building for children, that probably feels more reasonable than Rain Dance Kingdra etc.
(Note, I do not agree with this design philosophy. Major battles should either teach or test the player, Evasion spam generally does neither.)
you're probably right but uuuuugh. UUUGH. can we make 10 year olds smarter so they stop doing this shit already. put some brainchips on those kids
double posting but its for a different topic
people always talk about doubles, and implementing doubles in the main campaign of pokemon. Now, personally I enjoy singles battles too and i would prefer a more hybrid type of game, but lets ignore that and talk about just doubles
So my preference for this is very much only doubles in main fights (rivals, gyms etc) > doubles for all fights. I think the main problem with doubles is that for any fight that isnt important, it gets reaaaaally annoying to constantly do double fights with the common fodder trainers. theyre fun once or twice but i think the "doubles is faster" stuff stops being true the lower the quality of a trainer is. when the answer is just to spam a move, youd rather have a simple click move > action than click move > choose target > click move > choose target loop.
but the best part of doubles is that i think monotype gyms really benefits from being a doubles battle. for single monotype to not get destroyed by a counter, you need to be able to stack on immunities/resistances/find ways to counter. Fine on paper, that's just teambuilding! but we have to remember most gyms will not be high leveled or 6 mons, and not all types have ways to do that without being extremely overwhelming for its placement. its very easy to fall into romhacky "counters everything" teams, or to just not do enough and end up being bodied either way.
If you have a doubles team though, you force the player to either teambuild with multiple counters (already more interesting than using a single mon tbh) or for the other pokemon of the team to pick up the slack and be there to help the counter. meanwhile you can create a foe with pokemon that are actually supports and defensive without being blown exploded by the players starter or something. it also makes very small counters to types the team is weak to much more effective: you can have a water/ground type that protects the other water types from electric types, while another pokemon uses flying moves to chip grass types (doesnt have to be stab). its beatable, but engaging
people always talk about doubles, and implementing doubles in the main campaign of pokemon. Now, personally I enjoy singles battles too and i would prefer a more hybrid type of game, but lets ignore that and talk about just doubles
So my preference for this is very much only doubles in main fights (rivals, gyms etc) > doubles for all fights. I think the main problem with doubles is that for any fight that isnt important, it gets reaaaaally annoying to constantly do double fights with the common fodder trainers. theyre fun once or twice but i think the "doubles is faster" stuff stops being true the lower the quality of a trainer is. when the answer is just to spam a move, youd rather have a simple click move > action than click move > choose target > click move > choose target loop.
but the best part of doubles is that i think monotype gyms really benefits from being a doubles battle. for single monotype to not get destroyed by a counter, you need to be able to stack on immunities/resistances/find ways to counter. Fine on paper, that's just teambuilding! but we have to remember most gyms will not be high leveled or 6 mons, and not all types have ways to do that without being extremely overwhelming for its placement. its very easy to fall into romhacky "counters everything" teams, or to just not do enough and end up being bodied either way.
If you have a doubles team though, you force the player to either teambuild with multiple counters (already more interesting than using a single mon tbh) or for the other pokemon of the team to pick up the slack and be there to help the counter. meanwhile you can create a foe with pokemon that are actually supports and defensive without being blown exploded by the players starter or something. it also makes very small counters to types the team is weak to much more effective: you can have a water/ground type that protects the other water types from electric types, while another pokemon uses flying moves to chip grass types (doesnt have to be stab). its beatable, but engaging
Would it be a hot take for me to say like 80% of the non-boss trainers just shouldn't even be around in the games? (and replaced with higher quality and tougher battles, though not boss level obviously)
One of the worst things about the pokemon games is just how long it takes to play through them while also hardly doing anything, and the tons of trainer battles that are super easy to go through is one of the most egregious things causing that. SV replacing this cycle of going through routes catching some stuff, battling like 20 trainers with two underleveled raticates and five magikarps and whatever the fuck else, getting to the city and talking to like 20 people, and so on, with exploring a larger region and having two other stories with their own boss battles replacing that cycle, is probably the biggest thing that made me enjoy the game so much more than most other pokemon games.
Seriously, so many of the battles being mind-numbingly boring and easy is awful. Switching to doubles and less quantity but far higher quality would be awesome.
I think i agree, we dont need infestations of worthless trainers, we can have things like route/area minibosses that are just little challenges to get you ready to move on to the next area. most games have a few trainers that stand out for being a bit more challenging, and i think you can make a pokemon game with just them
That is for sure a hot take I can agree with. It doesn’t help that some Gym Leaders - even back in the good old days! - were barely better than generic trainers, or worse, outclassed by some random trainers right before they are fought.
I’d like to add Team Grunts prior to SV at that. So little variety for what is supposed to be a threatening criminal group, to the point they are more repetitive than other generic trainers. Having a few less Grunts with at least slightly more variety may help them feel individualized underneath their samey look, or going a similar route of what SV did with Team Star would help cut to the chase.
Great post.
i personally disagree, I like grinding against other trainers because I enjoy seeing my Pokemon get stronger, and many low stakes fights help me learn its strengths and weaknesses, as well as appreciating the subtleties of its strengths. It helps me develop personal relationships with my Pokemon.
That said, with xp share and longer battle animations, that is no longer feasible, and I feel like S/V and L:A did a great job introducing alternative ways to make games without grinding, which I felt worked to their benefit.
One thing they need to get better about is showing newer players strategy, bc Scarlet was my 2nd Pokemon game and also one I learned the least from, I kinda just overwhelmed everything without thinking, and when I did struggle in the endgame fights, it was harder for me to identify flaws in my team and strategy. And I’m a pretty smart adult.
I also think that most Pokemon basically feel the same to play as in-game these days, and that my team choices matter less, but I don’t see a fix for that one.
It makes sense with the original design philosophy of the games(which has since gone out the window and is why the franchise is somewhat flailing with regards to difficulty since ~gen 5).
Specifically, the early games were very big on gauntlets as the source of difficulty. You enter a dungeon(cave, office bldg, forest, etc) filled with enemies. Every X steps you are attacked by a wild mon. Progressing to the end requires fighting Y trainers. There's powerful/valuable items hidden about, but collecting them will require more steps and fighting more trainers. HM moves that kind of suck are required for navigation and limit your useable PP. Healing items or Repels can preserve your mons, but that's money that could go into TM purchases etc. This culminates in the E4, a series of 5 max-difficulty battles with no healing and no escape options.
Now, this didn't work well. The economy has always been broken, making healing items too accessible. Exploring and getting into more fights actively strengthens your mons, making future dungeons easier. Trainers don't reset, so "Explore everything you can, Escape Rope out of the cave, Center, and re-enter" is a great way of making progress. And frankly, dying because you went in with a Water and a Grass with a combined 40 PP of STAB and your 50th Geodude just landed 2 Magnitude 10s in a row isn't a great feeling.
So at some point, GF shifted the design. Healing is common. Wild mons are easier to avoid. The player is just given repels. Trainers mostly wait for you to attack them. And that would be fine, if they'd added additional difficulty elsewhere. But they're still designing bosses like the player has fought their way through an army of ninja to reach them and the fight needs to be winnable with 3 mons fainted.
The solution is obvious, just make the boss fights difficult on their own, but I think GF is scared of that turning off players. They flirt with this(gens 7 and 8), but they kept the barrage of weak battles around and didn't make things significantly difficult. Still, I do think there's progress being made, so maybe...?
Btw, Emerald had this solved in uhhhh, 2004?
I suppose it'd be a bit harder nowadays though, but it is what it is.
They really gotta encourage Doubles as the main way of playing if they want to push VGC that hard though. I fell out of Doubles back in the day because the Frontier Brains didn't show up on Doubles, how stupid is that?
I always found Emerald Frontier more fun when playing Doubles, then I stopped doing so when I noticed I never found Noland that way. Getting to use stuff like EQ + flying/levitator is sooooo satisfying.
Speaking of which, the Tower has a Multi Battle mode in which you get to pick your battle partner for double, could be another player or a NPC. Not a fan of the former bc you might as well be playing by yourself, but the latter is interesting. My favorite is what the Battle Tree did and letting you select the trainers you defeat as your partner, but this started in Emerald and I assume bc they don't want to draw a backsprite for all trainers that it looks like this. It's so cursed....
Speaking of which, the Tower has a Multi Battle mode in which you get to pick your battle partner for double, could be another player or a NPC. Not a fan of the former bc you might as well be playing by yourself, but the latter is interesting. My favorite is what the Battle Tree did and letting you select the trainers you defeat as your partner, but this started in Emerald and I assume bc they don't want to draw a backsprite for all trainers that it looks like this. It's so cursed....
not really? people want a full game of doubles, and emerald showed they could make one (1) good doubles gym, but not an entire game.
if you mean in team comp I think thats fair, though they still need to solve the early game doubles gym. you dont want it to feel like an easy chore beatdown, because then its slower singles, but the lower levels of anything means one good pokemon being supported by another can make it more of an headache than its supposed to be. its probably why the double gyms we have are all pretty much the last ones.
i think alola also solved this partially, but its easier to build a boss with a goon to support it than a team
Honestly I don’t really think I see the hardship of designing good early game double battles. Mons already has weak doubles tech that they can use as inspiration for battles and accustom the player to the battle style. Disarming Voice is a really weak spread move for instance, introduces the concept of spread moves to the player well, that type of thing. They just made Dragon Cheer which is weak dubs tech too. Late game that can be Howl and there’s clear mechanical power scaling happening there. Give the champion Decorate Alcremie lol.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with double battles that are kinda just 2 single battles except you can double target if you want to either. Most of XD’s early game is that and it plays well; you don’t really get support moves until later on on any of the available mons either on your or the opponent’s teams.
Double battles are kind of inherently faster than single battles too. Each individual turn may take longer but that’s because each turn is compressing two turns into one while taking less time than playing out 2 turns in a single battle does. So stomp battles should be taking less time on average not more. Especially if you’re stomping via actual doubles strategy such as Howl or Helping Hand or whatever and netting KOs in one turn that in singles would take 2.
I've said before, Doubles needs to be a whole game. If the player has to swap between Singles and Doubles, whichever one is less common will feel like an imposition, and the default will be "spam strong attacks" rather than anything that exploits the doubles-specific options.
If it were up to me, though, the game would swap between Doubles where you use 2 mons and multibattles where you are partnered with someone else(generally a Rival* or otherwise significant trainer). This would give the player an example of the more complicated strats available in Doubles while also letting the designers create puzzle battles to force the player to learn.
The other key is figuring out how to reduce the number of minor battles in favor of major ones. I don't think it's a coincidence that Orre doesn't have any wild mons. Doubles is complicated and they probably knew people wouldn't want to waste time getting spammed by 2 Zubats.
* 2 rivals, Hunter and Taylor. Hunter spams offensive moves at every opportunity, Taylor uses supportive stuff like Wide Guard and Coaching without ever using attacks. When partnered with the Player, you have to compensate for their weaknesses. When they team up against you, watch out.
If it were up to me, though, the game would swap between Doubles where you use 2 mons and multibattles where you are partnered with someone else(generally a Rival* or otherwise significant trainer). This would give the player an example of the more complicated strats available in Doubles while also letting the designers create puzzle battles to force the player to learn.
The other key is figuring out how to reduce the number of minor battles in favor of major ones. I don't think it's a coincidence that Orre doesn't have any wild mons. Doubles is complicated and they probably knew people wouldn't want to waste time getting spammed by 2 Zubats.
* 2 rivals, Hunter and Taylor. Hunter spams offensive moves at every opportunity, Taylor uses supportive stuff like Wide Guard and Coaching without ever using attacks. When partnered with the Player, you have to compensate for their weaknesses. When they team up against you, watch out.
A full doubles game is a concept I am very interested in personally, but I think that the modern game's standards are potentially ill-equipped to do so without making a few unorthodox choices and breaking some established conventions.
Points about generic double battles being pretty boring when they are constant and monotonous is true, in my opinion; the Orre duology's biggest strength is that even the most generic fights often come in-built with an objective that can not be solved by simply swinging for the fences with the same one-two punch combo over and over again. The process of whittling down and catching Shadow Pokemon leverages the concentration of focus onto a smaller number of more complicated battles by utilizing a tighter margin for error and a window for success that doesn't extent infinitely upward with player power. Meanwhile, the severely limited roster pushes players to make use of more situational and haphazard synergies, and the purification system around it all pushes players to taste test all kinds of different combinations rather than simply settling on a single power couple to take on the world.
Removing the dynamics around Shadow Pokemon from the game takes away all this design scaffolding that pushes the strengths of doubles to the forefront, and you can see that if you see what a playthrough of these games looks like if you choose to simply ignore the vast majority of Shadow Pokemon - you get a lot of easy, tedious fights. With that in mind, I think people who are skeptical of just taking an indev vanilla main series game and flipping a switch to turn every fight from singles to doubles are probably right.
With that all said, I think that it is a big tricky to find what the keystone here is. I wouldn't hate an Orre game remake or blatant spiritual successor, but it'd be sort of narrow to say Shadow Pokemon are the only way to make doubles work. There's a lot of things one could point to, but to me, it's a lot about being extremely strict on limiting powerful, linear strategies that beat a large majority of possible opponents but suffer into specific counters. Stuff like instant Weather or Terrain abilities, redirection + setup sweeper duos, trick room setup duos, and even just strong and reliable spread move combos can all easily erode a lot of the potential of a doubles game by being a solution to too great a portion of the game.
...and of course, that's slightly awkward considering those aforementioned strategies make up a pretty solid amount of what people think of when considering VGC in general. Sort of similar to how porting competitive singles staple moves and items like hazards and utility attack overload into a singles game does not constitute good singles ingame design, I don't know how much the "Doubles game as a pipeline into VGC" thing would actually work without just making something more like a series of Battle CDs / direct VGC tutorial, which I don't think is something people are thinking of with a "Doubles Game."
I have more thoughts but am limited by time.
Points about generic double battles being pretty boring when they are constant and monotonous is true, in my opinion; the Orre duology's biggest strength is that even the most generic fights often come in-built with an objective that can not be solved by simply swinging for the fences with the same one-two punch combo over and over again. The process of whittling down and catching Shadow Pokemon leverages the concentration of focus onto a smaller number of more complicated battles by utilizing a tighter margin for error and a window for success that doesn't extent infinitely upward with player power. Meanwhile, the severely limited roster pushes players to make use of more situational and haphazard synergies, and the purification system around it all pushes players to taste test all kinds of different combinations rather than simply settling on a single power couple to take on the world.
Removing the dynamics around Shadow Pokemon from the game takes away all this design scaffolding that pushes the strengths of doubles to the forefront, and you can see that if you see what a playthrough of these games looks like if you choose to simply ignore the vast majority of Shadow Pokemon - you get a lot of easy, tedious fights. With that in mind, I think people who are skeptical of just taking an indev vanilla main series game and flipping a switch to turn every fight from singles to doubles are probably right.
With that all said, I think that it is a big tricky to find what the keystone here is. I wouldn't hate an Orre game remake or blatant spiritual successor, but it'd be sort of narrow to say Shadow Pokemon are the only way to make doubles work. There's a lot of things one could point to, but to me, it's a lot about being extremely strict on limiting powerful, linear strategies that beat a large majority of possible opponents but suffer into specific counters. Stuff like instant Weather or Terrain abilities, redirection + setup sweeper duos, trick room setup duos, and even just strong and reliable spread move combos can all easily erode a lot of the potential of a doubles game by being a solution to too great a portion of the game.
...and of course, that's slightly awkward considering those aforementioned strategies make up a pretty solid amount of what people think of when considering VGC in general. Sort of similar to how porting competitive singles staple moves and items like hazards and utility attack overload into a singles game does not constitute good singles ingame design, I don't know how much the "Doubles game as a pipeline into VGC" thing would actually work without just making something more like a series of Battle CDs / direct VGC tutorial, which I don't think is something people are thinking of with a "Doubles Game."
I have more thoughts but am limited by time.
see the issue imo is that while this is true, just because a doubles battle goes faster doesnt mean it feels faster for a player. a lot of the feeling comes from the effort of adjusting 4 inputs instead of one, which feels more sluggish than a single move click, even if that means you knock things faster. and it sounds exaggerating that itd matter that much but i think it does have an effect, as whenever i ask why someone doesnt like double battles the answer is more commonly that theyre annoying and slow
No, no. I was talking about how most battles in Emerald could be doubles if you wanted, but they could also be turned into singles if you broke up the duos.
And that gym was a top 3 gym in the whole franchise lol, put some respect on Tate and Liza's names
I dunno about that. Iirc, some editors can be used to force doubles for any trainer. Maybe I'll do that in SwSh when I'm done with Stadium 2/Crystal.