My brother in christ, that's like picking between satan and lucifer. They both are evil.
(Idk if lucifer is actually evil but what I'm trying to say is that they are both the devil)
-
Check out the relaunch of our general collection, with classic designs and new ones by our very own Pissog!
-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
(Idk if lucifer is actually evil but what I'm trying to say is that they are both the devil)
This probably isn't a only a Pokemon-thing, since Disney is also guilty of it as well, but am I the only one who dislike how Pokemon hunters are portrayed as evil and illegal- along with hunting as a frowned upon sport as well as people who portray it. Hunting can actually be a good way to manage animal populations that have gone overboard like deer in which natural predators like cougars and wolves have been drawn to near extinction. Not to mention there are laws protecting animals, one cannot shoot legally without a license- and there are many restrictions to hunting: For example, one cannot shoot mothers with young, or juveniles that not have fully grown. Also one of my friends is a hunter and he is one of nicest people I met, so I don't like how popular culture portrays hunting as evil.
Yeah. I see this as a combination of like, hunters / poachers are very easy to frame as negative in media - they make good villains - and broader issues with Western values. In general, while Western attitudes towards animals, have improved in recent decades, they've often improved in flawed, self-contradictory, and hypocritical ways. E.g. dogs often being categorized as "pets" and pigs often being categorized as "livestock", despite their similar intelligence levels, making one often taboo to kill and the other unquestioned to kill, even though reversing the arrangement is certainly plausible. I see current hunting attitudes and portrayals as similar.
i think it also depends on so many things. hunters of different countries and different groups that hunt different animals are. different lmfao. sometimes hunters are anti wolf and kill coyotes and sometimes theyre their hardest defenders. sometimes hunters approve of whaling and shark poaching and sometimes they want to hunt local invasive species like lionfish. some hunters are native people and others are there for prestige. etc
its much easier to just... get a group that practices specific harmful hunting than to criticize the vague concept of hunting. like if you had idk whale poachers as a concept in pokemon. then again the games flipflop on whaling and seem to be vaguely pro whaling (in the same way that people who arent super tuned in the news and saw some vague new info are)
its much easier to just... get a group that practices specific harmful hunting than to criticize the vague concept of hunting. like if you had idk whale poachers as a concept in pokemon. then again the games flipflop on whaling and seem to be vaguely pro whaling (in the same way that people who arent super tuned in the news and saw some vague new info are)
To be fair my interpretation of hunters/poachers in Pokémon has always had the assumption of “they’re trophy hunters”. Probably because they are portrayed as evil or evil-lite and trophy hunters are the versions of hunters that are evil in their intent. It probably also comes down to how the term trophy hunter is used, we tend to only say it pejoratively either in regards to them killing protected species illegally, or at least in killing animals we respect or think shouldn’t be killed. Their portrayal in mons is “they shouldn’t be hunting mons” so they fit at least one of the two categories.
Like I know what you mean, not all hunters are bad, but population management has never been mentioned in Pokémon media afaik so these hunters obviously aren’t doing it for that reason. Idk why your mental journey would be “Pokémon’s hunters are bad -> some irl hunters are good and some are bad -> Pokémon is portraying the good hunters unfairly” instead of the more natural “Pokémon’s hunters are bad -> some irl hunters are good and some are bad -> Pokémon is portraying the bad ones”. (I know the terms good and bad here are reductive, they do the job).
I don’t think little Timmy is ready for the conversation about how we need to shoot the cute lil Deerling because they eat too many leaves anyway.
Like I know what you mean, not all hunters are bad, but population management has never been mentioned in Pokémon media afaik so these hunters obviously aren’t doing it for that reason. Idk why your mental journey would be “Pokémon’s hunters are bad -> some irl hunters are good and some are bad -> Pokémon is portraying the good hunters unfairly” instead of the more natural “Pokémon’s hunters are bad -> some irl hunters are good and some are bad -> Pokémon is portraying the bad ones”. (I know the terms good and bad here are reductive, they do the job).
I don’t think little Timmy is ready for the conversation about how we need to shoot the cute lil Deerling because they eat too many leaves anyway.
That would be the opposite of a situation where hunting could help.
Limited use TMs are not inherently a bad thing. I think it's more interesting from a game design perspective to force a player to commit to a choice than be able to slap Earthquake on everything. Too much player freedom can easily (and ironically) lead to homogeneity, as I've learned from playing Final Fantasy V.
TMs should still be unlimited use once you beat the champion, though.
TMs should still be unlimited use once you beat the champion, though.
I think SV got it right tbh.
You can get them in the overworld, encouraging exploration, you can also get multiple of them by crafting as well.
I never really liked infinite use TMs. You either have things locked until way too late, or something slips through the cracks and utterly breaks the game (BW2's Return, and SM's Scald are easy examples of this.)
On the other hand, with limited TMs, you can get cool things like Platinum's early Earthquake TM, which is such an incredible move that actually makes you stop and think what is getting it.
Where the old games failed was making them infinitely available at some point, especially post-game.
maybe its the open world bad!! bias but i dont like sv's system, both because i dont like the material system - which feels like it only exists to artifically increase the "depth" of the open world without offering anything interesting - and that it ends up like mindless grinding/the ui is kinda ass. something where maybe theres a crafting tree where crafting/unlocking lower level tms is part of unlocking the high level ones. so the pace would be the players pace and how much they want to work towards certain moves, and maybe they could have tasks to be able to learn those moves by exploring, instead of just being another thing on a shop you buy. id keep them infinite use this way
Id say things more out of there but I think that'd just be wishlisting
Id say things more out of there but I think that'd just be wishlisting
Gen II made field move TMs available in the Dept Store for purchase after you found them in the wild. I was always shocked that never made a comeback for all TMs. Selling them Post-Game for BP would also make sense.
Problems and benefits with each system we've seen:
Limited use, 1 supply: Players have to seriously consider whether to use a TM, which is good for forcing decisions, but leads to a lot of players hoarding TMs during their playthroughs for fear of wasting them, and makes postgame/competitive stuff excessively awkward.
Infinite use: TMs have to be excessively expensive or hard to find due to how much of a power-boost they can be. This makes buying a Swords Dance or even Rock Tomb/Bulldoze TM a serious decision. But once the player has access to a TM, they have no reason NOT to use it on every mon they can if it's an improvement, which makes broken early TMs a serious balance problem and even generic good moves will show up on enough sets to make various mons all feel very samey. The high cost can severely mess with the in-game economy.
Limited use, crafted supply: The crafting system isn't very interesting and feels artificially limited in which mon drops apply to which items. The supply also isn't limited enough to really feel like it's forcing decisions even early playthrough. But it makes post-game reasonably smooth and it encourages using TMs early-game without the XY effect of every physical attacker on your team sharing 2-3 moves.
I like the crafting system most, but both reducing the different types of mon drops(just give us like 3 types of drop for each type) and then increasing the number required per TM might be the way to go.
Stantler’s entry in RSE and its remakes also mention how it was driven to near extinction for its antlers.
I mentioned this a while ago, but one of the things that really underscored how goofy TM-related balance can be was Toxic's distribution in earlier gens.
In a lot of the early games, a ton of Pokemon could be taught Toxic via TM regardless of how much thematic sense it did or did not make, but the Toxic TM was usually a true one-off: one found in the quest, with no way to buy or farm more. This makes a decent bit of game balance sense specifically for the quest: the player gets to choose only one party member to teach a pretty unique move to (lots of other moves can inflict other status conditions, but only Toxic inflicts its unique brand of poison), but he or she could choose pretty much any party member to be the recipient. There's a trade-off.
Later on, once TMs were infinite-use, something like Toxic suddenly looks completely out of place. Now that the supply was no longer limited, it really draws attention to the fact that pretty much everything could learn it and how little sense that makes.
Toxic as a limited TM now is pretty nebulous in the fact that Umbreon can learn it in Scarlet/Violet (poisonous sweat) but not in BDSP.
Also on the topic of Toxic, I ran it on Sawsbuck during the January 2025 metagame of 35 Pokes because I nicknamed it after a character from Reverse: 1999, Jessica, that is also a deer like Sawsbuck, but has a huge poison theme and Toxic was basically the best move to make that nickname fitting. It was actually somewhat useful to put threats to my team in a Catch-22 situation I feel like: get the hell out of dodge, get Sawsbuck out of their face, or deal with the Toxic timer. Outside of that, there's no real justification for Deerling and Sawsbuck learning Toxic from their debut to USUM.
I mostly consider that there doesn't need to be an additional justification because that example is sufficient: damage-over-time is important enough that it should be widely distributed, and we're a long way from every mon having their own bespoke style of it.
This kind of thing just happens all the time, Game Freak changing their mind on moves
I'd know since I'm still mad Sylveon has lost Mystical Fire in Gen 9 despite literally getting it in Gen 8 and a spinoff making that move part of its core identity lol
That's honestly wack tho.
It makes them feel super dated now that everything got dumb coverage while they're barely a step above Regieleki.
They should at least have enough to be functional and stand apart from each other.
I don't think the eevees will ever be Good anyway unless you buff them insanely, id rather do something fun with flavor and make them really embrace being elementals of a specific type
I like the restricted Eeveelution idea in concept, but I also agree it's looking more and more out of place as the basic coverage threshold / move creep rises. Maybe give them signature moves of their type that are especially powerful, so that they embrace being elementals while not feeling hamstrung?
i feel like thats the least interesting way to handle them as there's already plenty of mons who moves consist of stab(s) + random mediocre coverage. it's like the main indicator of a forgettable throwaway mon
personally i always really liked the rom hack idea (i forget where it came from) of allowing the eeveelutions to devolve while keeping their moves. that doesnt just make them all individually better, it really adds something unique to the game and makes them feel more cohesive
If the eeveelutions have a bit more limited movesets, then I think that's fine. What's not fine though, is when they have absolutely no coverage at all. It took till this gen for them to all get a coverage move in alluring voice. I don't see why espeon can't get focus blast for example, most psychic types do. Or why glaceon doesn't get flash cannon as quite a few ice types have.
The """versatility""" of the Eevee line is pretty clearly designed to come from the choice of evolution itself. Making any one of those individual evolutions versatile on its own kind of makes the whole gimmick crumble.
it comes from the manga, and it'd never be implemented (ignoring the obvious series breaking non permanent evolutions, we already got megas for that) because that eevee was a mistreated rocket experiment and its good ending was to lose that ability and evolve normally into espeon