It could be worse than confined to the competitive scene: we could still have gen 2 shiny mechanics instead of the Masuda Method.
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(Little) Things that annoy you in Pokémon
- Thread starter BriarRose
- Start date
it has long confused me that our rival in gen 1 uses Pidgeot over Fearow or Dodrio when all the other pokemon they use are high in BST tryhard choices.
also yeah, Fearow is crazy good by gen 1 standards for ingame. 90 attack and 100 speed with spammable stab moves is great, but even Doduo outclasses it and gets Drill Peck earlier than Fearow does. Love the drill bird, wish it got some modern love like a new evolution or form or something.
It literally just needs high crit rate on Drill Peck so it can pair it with Drill Run and Sniper for crit builds.
Drill Run was all it needed to be good in its in-game role again.
I wish you could change the ball you caught your Pokémon in for another ball in your bag.
Make it destroy the original ball so you can’t just catch all pidgeys in the master ball and swap them out for pokeballs after.
Silly little aesthetic thing, but great balls are ugly and so is the master ball, and trying to catch legendaries in one that matches is a real painin the balls
Make it destroy the original ball so you can’t just catch all pidgeys in the master ball and swap them out for pokeballs after.
Silly little aesthetic thing, but great balls are ugly and so is the master ball, and trying to catch legendaries in one that matches is a real pain
I could understand if they wouldn't let you change master balls, cherish balls, or strange balls, maaaybe even the relatively limited apricorn balls, but I agree that if we can buy the ball in bulk at the pokemart we should be able to change a mon's ball in this way.
Replaying Emerald reminded me when I first met this lady in Slateport, telling me that my Pokémon need to "go a little harder". This was the introduction to Effort Values, and there's absolutely no way anyone figured how that worked by just playing the game. I thought it meant high leveled Pokémon at first, then I assumed it was like Friendship or beating the League, but as a kid I was so confused how only some of my in game team got the ribbon but the rest didn't.
Speaking of which, kid me never saw the point of EV reducing berries aside from Pokeblock ingredients
Speaking of which, kid me never saw the point of EV reducing berries aside from Pokeblock ingredients
I was definitely expecting him to swap his early-route bird out for something better in lategame, that seemed like what he would do. Looking back, ESPECIALLY since he's guaranteed to have at least one other flying type. Giving him a Snorlax/Tauros/Machamp wouldn't have made him better, necessarily, but it would have been very fitting. But also BoltBeam coverage kills 4/6 minimum of his mons in RB and also sweeps Lance, so one fewer bird would be a good thing.
It's interesting that in Yellow, the Rival did get rid of his Rattata and his Fearow, swapping them for better mons(the two coverage mons for Rattata, Kadabra instead of Fearow). Even if Fearow was good, as a player it makes a lot of sense for how we think of him that he'd do that.
But it would have made him overlap with Bruno if you gave him Machamp.
I've never liked that rule TBH. I can see why they think it's important to not overlap, but it just feels very artificial.
I think it's fine to remain separate and it's not THAT artificial (especially in games with larger rosters), but probably more to the point Blue already can overlap with Lance if he has a Gyarados team and if we move outward from the E4 will always overlap with Sabrina's Alakazam & Giovanni's Rhydon.
So if they really wanted to give him a Machamp to replace Pidgeot (which honestly wouldn't be that much of an upgrade, if we're being serious...) I think they'd have gotten away with it but honestly I wouldn't think to give him a Machamp ever. I think the only reason he got it in HGSS is because they made him have a Trick Room gimmick and just wanted to replace Alakazam who would be too fast to make use of it so let's swap one three-stage trade evolution with another, but Golem had too much overlap with Rhydon. So Machamp it is.
Tauros would've been neat, though. Let's Go giving that to him to replace the Pidgeot (since that's Trace's thing now) was a good call. (Though maybe the unused Oak battle using Tauros had them back away? who knows)
But ultimately I think they stuck with Pidgeot because even though it totally fails to do it in practice, they still wanted him to take one of his early captures to end game and Pidgeot is seemingly by design meant to evolve in lock step with the starters.
they did give him a Tauros in Let's Go, but they also made his team like half Lance from GSC which is funny
I do wonder if this was a consideration, probably only early one and 3 of Oak's other mons seemingly overlap with Blue anyways, but still. I kinda wish they just had Oak be a Normal specialist like in Adventures because it would have been unexpected.
While we are on that topic, I do find it annoying Oak was scrapped because it was just a plain cool idea for a superboss thematically. Closest we have ever gotten is Clavel, and it's surprising the third starter going to the Professor figure was not tried again earlier. Oak also just fits perfectly in Gen 1's "twists" as far as the limited storytelling allowed, right alongside Giovanni being the last leader and champion Blue, and unlike them doesn't require mental gymnastics to be even possible in-universe.
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Pretty sure it was done with Kukui though, at least in base Sun and Moon
the version exclusive choices often confuse and frustrate me, especially when I load up a game to run thru it again and want to use a mon only to learn that mon isn't in the third version for whatever reason.
people who want to use murkrow in platinum or mareep in crystal getting got by game freak, lmao
people who want to use murkrow in platinum or mareep in crystal getting got by game freak, lmao
I kind of like that--despite his overall characterization and demeanor--he's not above getting attached to what is presumably his first capture.
Though he does eventually swap it out in some games. In the FRLG rematch he replaces Pidgeot and Rhydon with Heracross and Tyranitar, which is probably my favorite iteration of his final team.
Nah.
I want everyone to know exactly how much of a stupid tryhard I am when they see all of my legendaries in Premiere Balls.
Honchkrow and Mismagius are huge losses for Platinum. I guess they had to gimp that version in some way to counterbalance how much of a drastic improvement it was to DP overall.
Never fighting Oak is really weird in the context we've gotten two remakes of the Kanto games (+the Johto revisits). It feels like it'd be an easy, fun, extra battle to put into the post game. Especially with Let's Go giving you extra fights against Red, Blue and now Green (not to mention all the Master Trainers in general).
oh true. I often forget about it because I played the Ultra versions first.
That's another thing to be annoyed too, I like Kukui a lot more for the "champion" role in Alola (and he having Inconeroar wpuld have been perfect) and unlike other changes in the Ultra versions that one seems kinda arbitrary. Maybe it's just that I don't find Hau that memorable of a rival to begin with tho.
Genuinely what I hate the most about Let's Go is Lance's fakeout. Iirc he literally suggests that your final opponent at the League will be Oak.
Like don't get me wrong, I never expected the Champion to not be the rival again. But that's beyond teasing at that point, both for new players and for veterans who would have appreciated some new twist (specially with how iffy Let's Go is timeline-wise)
I'd never read his dialog there before
Seems pretty set up as a joke rather than a proper fake out, but what a goofy change.
Version exclusives have always been a terrible but impactful design choice. It's an understatement to say I don't have a very complete memory of my childhood, but I do remember discovering version exlusivity as a concept in a Pokémon Magazine during the pre-release of HGSS. I had played other mons games before that, but the concept of version exclusivity never occurred to me because I had never tried to complete the dex.
Specifically I remember struggling to decide between Phanpy and Teddiursa. These were two of my favourite Pokémon at the time, hell they still are I have a Phanpy plushy on my desk below the monitor I'm writing this on and an Ursaring in my profile picture, and I spent real emotional energy determining which of the two I liked more to choose which version I wanted to get.
And then the decision doesn't mean anything because they're extremely underlevelled in an optional endgame area at a 10% encounter rate. I didn't know where to catch them, I just knew they were version exclusives, and by the time I got to Blackthorn City I'd already forgotten that Phanpy was the reason I chose HeartGold in the first place. Which is a good thing, because otherwise I would've been trawling the map constantly to try and find it which would've annoyed the hell outta me.
thank you gen 2 remakes not fixing this problem with gen 2 lmao
And then Crystal put both early game.
That might as well be a tagline on the box for HGSS.
I prefer Kukui because he seems like a more serious opponent. Like, the Alola League being new is a cool concept, but I don't want the region based on Hawaii to be lesser than the other regions*, and making it Hau you have to fight...you've already beaten him repeatedly. The Professor, even if he did canonically lose to Lance, is at least an opponent who seems like the League is trying to stop you.
That said, Title Defense Battle was an excellent concept and I honestly think it works better than the post-game tournaments the next generations did.
*Specifically I think the anime screwed this up
It also helps that he actually made it to Lance. He did beat the Indigo Elite Four, so it makes sense that he'd be the most qualified to be the interim champion.
Hau being the final contender for the title in USUM was awful. Especially since a big part of his character is being lackadaisical about... pretty much everything, really.
It falls flat because even if he tries to step up at the end, it's not like he's one of those rivals that stay ahead of the player the whole game or a battle junkie like Pearl.
It further undermines the league because a literal child who loves malasada just decided to go for it at the last second, and beat all the region's top trainers besides the player and Kukui.
I understand why they wanted to swap out Kukui in USUM, but I agree that Hau was a boring choice. I would've like to see the ultra recon squad members a bit more engaged in catching Pokemon throughout the story, culminating in one of them battling you for the champion role. They could have used Naganadel as reveal to the player that doesn't look up everything online that the Poipole you get after Necrozma can evolve.
But I don't think there was a hint of anything like that in the teraleak, so they probably eventually settled on doing it as a callback to rby and maybe to try to repair his reputation as the Dud.