Or, you know, it could have been rushed dev cycles that they've been having to deal with at least since X and Y giving major console releases in some cases just barely over two years of dev time rather than the industry average of four to five rather than just miraculously every single one of the over 200 people working on the game being incompetent. Funny as it is for some people to believe, Game Freak isn't in the same place as it was 30 years ago where it has to have the music guy learn programming because one of their six programmers quit. Frankly the mythologized understanding of the development of gens 1 and 2 have been disastrous for understanding the issues plaguing modern Pokémon.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
So if you don't happen to find it cool then there just straight up isn't a point to having one? And this is supposed to convince me that them being put into everything nowadays is a good thing?
Yeah if you don't like open worlds you are in the minority since most people think it's cool and positive aura.
Shit look at the Mario Kart World material; they spend 30 seconds showing P Switches in the Direct and have two instances of "you can fuck around in the world while waiting for friends", but a lot of what the open world is for is to make the world feel interconnected, alive, and the aura of having tracks designed in a large world rather than individual.
If that isn't cool aura for you (which valid), then there is essentially no purpose. But to the majority of people that's cool as fuck.
Also like idk what you're trying to say here. "If you don't find it cool then there is no point" is something you could say for so many things. Personally I think a lot of games include bossfights for no reason other than aura to the point I think a lot of games would be better if they just cut them, especially in the 2000s. But to a lot of people bossfights are memorable and cool, so I'd just be being wrong to insist on not having them.
Personal taste is a thing more news at 11
Bluntly, I'm real tired of personal taste only being valid justification for the majority. No, making something open world or whatever does not make up for content that was cut to insert the new popular thing. Companies chasing ever-wider audiences leading to a homogenized scene should be condemned, not celebrated. Given infinite development resources, sure, put in optional open-world elements. But if you want to make a mainline pokemon game, focus on the stuff that actually defines a mainline pokemon game.
Look sonny Jim, I've been here for all nine generations so far and my god, Gen 4 was slow. Like painfully slow. Great story, great new Pokemon, for sure, but the games were bloody slow.
Gen 3 was not "close to perfect", it did "Dexit" before "Dexit" was a thing...that and the amount of water in Hoen, blah blah blah...
No game in Gen 4 makes my top five Pokémon mainline games. Gen 5 though, BW2 is a masterpiece of design and gameplay and its postgame is just on another level to everything else.
I don't think anyone is disagreeing we want caves, we want spalunking, we want to go into buildings, we want to fly, swim, dive, etc etc, but BoTW and ToTK prove you can have open world and structure and exploration together. Don't throw the Elekid out with the bathwater, as they say.
Look, I'm sure you're a good guy but you cannot be serious with that point.
My god, the stuff that defines a Pokémon mainline game isn't set in stone.
We've had:
- Gym leaders
- No gym leaders
- Elite four
- No elite four
- No champion
- No league at all, in fact
- Past
- Present
- "Future" ish
- All of the pokemon
- Some of the pokemon
- Only new pokemon
- Only old pokemon
- Bike
- New bikes
- No bikes
- Bikes that are dragons
- Boats
- No boats
- Water, lots of it
- No water at all
- Three legends
- Two legends
- a fuck ton of legends
- A legendary trio
- A legendary trio and oh wait a fourth member
- A legendary quartet
- How about no legendaries other than the box legendaries
- A dickhead of a rival
- A literal dickhead of a rival
- A sickly rival
- a do gooder rival
- a team of friends
- no friends at all
- one starter from three
- two starters evolved
- one starter fixed with no evolution
- the same but eevee
- eevee but you get to choose what to evolve it into
- you can dive now
- now you can't
- sky battles
- Ha they're gone now
- mini games
- no mini games
- you have a mother and an absent father
- you have a mother and a father who's a gym leader
- you have neither because you're an outcast
- you have a family and the dad is absent because dead
- you have single battles
- you have double battles
- you have triple battles
- you have rotation battles
- no wait it's just up to double battles now
- nope, everything is single or double now
- oh wait everything is double battles
- mega evolution
- megas and z
- they're gone now, now everything is giant
- and now everything is crystal instead
There are no rules or guidelines for what constitutes a mainline Pokémon game. It's always changing.
I like change.
Since this is all so vague and subjective, am I not correct in saying that open worlds give me a feeling of boredom and have the aura of an anime filler?
Ah yes, appeal to the masses. Truly the standard of which art is judged by.
Honestly, the big point you're missing is why AAA gaming is running full-steam into a brick wall. Trading content for aura and viral quip bait is what's making a lot of games outright bad in pretty much every conceivable way.
It's precisely why the term slop is in vogue. Open world gameplay is one of the many checkboxes shareholders want ticked so they know they're probably going to get an return on their investment. And a LOT of open world games don't benefit from it at all.
I'll hammer the point home by pointing out that this is explicitly the opposite of art.
Judging by your definition, sports games filled to the brim with lootboxes bullshit are peak art with more aura than a DBZ character. Do you see how insane this sounds?
It also alienated a good chunk of the franchise by getting rid of its most iconic features (Dungeons and item-based progression)
Pretty bad example to be fair, and I really like BotW.
Personal taste isn't only used for the majority lol there's plenty of niche games like SMT that still are made
It's just you're saying "why do AAA game developers that got here by appealing to the majority of the audience appealing to the majority of the audience" and that's just a question that answers itself.
Why is Legends ZA going Action RPG? Because Action RPGs are really fucking in, and this is something mass Western audiences have been begging for for a long ass time.
We have plenty of indie, AA, or just niche franchises within AAA publishers that are for smaller demographics, or even just spinoffs. But there's no reason Pokemon wouldn't be one of the franchises to try to do what people want. That's like its job
You're correct but also the majority disagree with you so it lowkey doesn't matter
Since when was this about the standard by which art is judged by lmfao
That's why Elden Ring didn't win GOTY and why 90% of the people saying "x game is slop" didn't also buy that game, right?
People call anything they don't care for slop. It really doesn't matter.
Do you know how many people call Pokemon slop? When I was growing up people said Pokemon is the Call of Duty of JRPGs because every game was the same and they had little artistic merit. People who don't care about X and see that it is made to appeal to Y who they don't understand go to Z: It's slop.
Not really
That isn't my definition at all you are just saying shit atp Lowkey
I hate musical segments in a movie so I don't watch Disney movies but I don't go "Then what's in it for me?!" when Disney keeps making movies with musical segments because most people like them and think they're great I don't think this conversation should be so difficult
Like I basically just described that open world games are personal taste and that if you don't get it, you just don't get it, and it's not for you. Sucks that that is the trend and you don't like it, but that's Life!
I hate roguelikes and if you asked me two, maybe three years ago I'd have told you roguelikes are "indie game slop" but I realized that's silly and I don't go and say "Balatro is unartistic slop and Nubby's Number Factory is chasing trends and the masses are wrong" unless behind closed doors to vent annoyance because a lot of people like something I don't doesn't make it worse. Like this is just a normal part of being a fan of a multi-faceted media with people doing different things, sometimes the thing on top is something you don't care about. And it's up to you if you want to basically disrespect the people who enjoy something and the artists who made it because you don't get it, or if we can just joke about personal taste and at the end of the day go "Yeah it's not for me but it's good people enjoy it"
Especially when we aren't even talking about like. Gacha games, something that can be argued to be a genuine societal ill. We're talking about a genre that is usually a singleplayer game with a single payment or a large DLC expansion lol
Like I basically just described that open world games are personal taste and that if you don't get it, you just don't get it, and it's not for you. Sucks that that is the trend and you don't like it, but that's Life!
I hate roguelikes and if you asked me two, maybe three years ago I'd have told you roguelikes are "indie game slop" but I realized that's silly and I don't go and say "Balatro is unartistic slop and Nubby's Number Factory is chasing trends and the masses are wrong" unless behind closed doors to vent annoyance because a lot of people like something I don't doesn't make it worse. Like this is just a normal part of being a fan of a multi-faceted media with people doing different things, sometimes the thing on top is something you don't care about. And it's up to you if you want to basically disrespect the people who enjoy something and the artists who made it because you don't get it, or if we can just joke about personal taste and at the end of the day go "Yeah it's not for me but it's good people enjoy it"
Especially when we aren't even talking about like. Gacha games, something that can be argued to be a genuine societal ill. We're talking about a genre that is usually a singleplayer game with a single payment or a large DLC expansion lol
Again, I’ve been here since…well…The Legend of Zelda (god I feel old) and although I think we all agree, having proper dungeons is better, BoTW was a breath of fresh air and Zelda is also not a fixed point in time with only very strict rules in place.
But would I like dungeons back? Oh absolutely. I also wanted Megas back in Pokemon and oh look…
Point is, if every generation is the same, they’re not generations and they’re not interesting. Change is necessary.
I don't like to make broad generalizations about core design principles that can be executed well, but at this point in my life, whenever I sit down for an """open world""" game and am greeted by THIS:
...I don't think "man, what grand adventure awaits."
I think "god, what an obnoxious list of chores to plow through."
I don't think SV's world design is terrible. But I also don't think the nonlinear framework actually added anything. Part of the reason why Team Star feels like they have no impact on the world around them is because you can just literally ignore them until you've done everything else, when pretty much every villainous team before them would have roadblocked you at some point and actually present themselves as a meaningful threat for you to solve. SV doesn't have any stakes or antagonist until you get all the way to Area Zero.
One-hour long sidescrolling arcade action games from the '90s often have better narrative build-up and payoff than this.
...I don't think "man, what grand adventure awaits."
I think "god, what an obnoxious list of chores to plow through."
I don't think SV's world design is terrible. But I also don't think the nonlinear framework actually added anything. Part of the reason why Team Star feels like they have no impact on the world around them is because you can just literally ignore them until you've done everything else, when pretty much every villainous team before them would have roadblocked you at some point and actually present themselves as a meaningful threat for you to solve. SV doesn't have any stakes or antagonist until you get all the way to Area Zero.
One-hour long sidescrolling arcade action games from the '90s often have better narrative build-up and payoff than this.
Well then there'll just be a new trend that enthusiasts say is ruining gaming lol
Everything works in Cycles.
can i pick next. lets bring pinball back. everything has unnecessary pinball action
I met someone who hated Hollow Knight because they think it ruined the metroidvania genre by normalizing them "not being like Metroid" (when asked, and I quote "shooting things and walls and getting upgrades"), so I think it'd be really funny if we got something of that nature
Like we bring back collectathons but it's a pinball trend and not platforming, and like 500 millenial Banjo Kazooie fans will be on their hands and knees at Walmart
That's a wild take that I'm not even going to unpack. Just read that again, but slowly.
At any rate, this is all very subjective and pointless, as is discussing most subjective things. Especially art. I'd rather discuss politics than art tbh. It probably would've been a more honest discussion too.
But this is why we're calling out open world gameplay for the empty calorie trash it is. Everyone here is aware that we're on the Unpopular Opinions thread. We're not talking about the masses here, their feelings, their opinions, in fact, fuck their opinions.
Coherent, informed points based on objective facts can be made about how open world gameplay can be a detriment to a game if not done properly.
We understand that certain games do that to aura farm. We're also saying that it's a stupid decision that makes games worse.
Or I might as well save my time and just aura farm because I know I'm going to get more reactions on my post if I do this:
Your takes aren't really unpopular within the demographic of this forum, in fact by being in a Nintendo related properly forum you are by far the most likely to get agreement by basically saying "most AAA games are slop"
Back in 2015 all you had to do to make a Nintendo fan popoff is say "The Last of Us is slop, New Super Mario Bros. is for real gamers" and that shit was real embarrassing.
Even in movies you have the Nintendo fans who are like "The Super Mario Movie is CINEMA" and you KNOW their asses have not watched The Green Mile. How many of them are going to go see Sinner?
People in the Nintendo-Pokemon circle have been saying that everything else (except indie because so many indie games are based on Nintendo) is slop since like, probably the Gamecube, maybe the N64. When Astro Bot came out there were so many Nintendo fan demographic millennials saying that Sony needed to be more like Nintendo and that games like God of War Ragnarok were bad and boring actually.
All I'm tryna say is the demographic of people most likely to have bought Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu can sit their asses down about dictating what "slop" is, and that's probably a more unpopular opinion within this community than saying "Yeah you're right the AAA trends are so cringe and ruining gaming!"
does anyone remember this one this one was a classic lmfao
Here's my simple take: SV's Open World elements neither add nor take away anything significant for me in terms of progression. Being able to just quick travel and roam around to catch Pokemon is cool, but only insofar as it lets me play with certain Pokemon sooner in the adventure than more limiting games (like running into Level 35+ territory to evolve my Gallade before Iono).
SV is arguably my favorite game with an Open World design SPECIFICALLY because it doesn't design around it in a significant manner. You know what happens when you make an Open World with a bunch of borderline procedural tasks comprising most of the content? You gut any replay value and the game loses its long-lasting appeal when most players won't have any inclination to revisit it while chewing through the next 100+ hour game in a franchise. BOTW doesn't offer me anything on this front because if I want a short Zelda game I'll rerun ALttP, and if I want a longer playthrough I could get more out of marathoning Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, and/or Twilight Princess than hunting Korok Seeds and Shrines until I remember those aren't fun in the Open Games.
Part of this is also me being bitter because I resent the Zelda OW games for their impact on the franchise as much as gaming at large. It took 11 years to get a new traditional styled Zelda game (between LBW in 2013 and Echoes of Wisdom in 2024). As of this post we are now further removed from the most recent Linear 3D Zelda (Skwyward Sword in November 2011) than it was from the FIRST 3D Zelda (OoT in Nov 1998), and than OoT was from the inception of the franchise (February 1986). It's also not helped by the fact that these games are turning into a small "sub-series" with a direct sequel using the same world (OoT and MM shared chronology but were in totally different settings, as were the Toon Link games. Only ALBW fits the bill up to this point) and two Musou spin-offs that just cover events mentioned-but-not-depicted to fill in the lackluster narrative (vs the original Hyrule Warriors being an outside-mainline Crossover spectacle). To draw a comparison, it's like when Final Fantasy 13 came out, proved divisive at best... and then Square gave it 2 sequels and tried tying it into other verse projects like Type-0 and Versus 13 (before that became 15). I am well aware my critical perception is probably a minority, but it's the same feeling of "I can't stand this iteration but it won't go away," probably made worse KNOWING that popularity instead of creator stubbornness is ensuring that (vs, say, the divisive newer Paper Mario games).
I get the Wild games were huge sellers, but I have absolutely no enthusiasm for their style and their existence is now starting to feel like it actively infringes on one that I DO care about since it's the Dev team putting work into a game that does not retain any of the design or "vibes" that I got invested in the IP for. SV can debate quality but I have no hesitation saying they fit right in as mainline Pokemon games, which is not something I can give to "better" Open World games like BOTW or TOTK. I wish people would stop focusing on how SV are good or bad Open World games, especially because I'm not convinved a "good" one of those even exists past the year of 2013-2015 with GTA 5 in general, or Xenoblade Chronicles X in a Nintendo specific context, and instead "Open World or not, does this design gel with the IP or is the name slapped on to sell a different idea?"
tl;dr Open World Zelda is worse than Open World Pokemon.
SV is arguably my favorite game with an Open World design SPECIFICALLY because it doesn't design around it in a significant manner. You know what happens when you make an Open World with a bunch of borderline procedural tasks comprising most of the content? You gut any replay value and the game loses its long-lasting appeal when most players won't have any inclination to revisit it while chewing through the next 100+ hour game in a franchise. BOTW doesn't offer me anything on this front because if I want a short Zelda game I'll rerun ALttP, and if I want a longer playthrough I could get more out of marathoning Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, and/or Twilight Princess than hunting Korok Seeds and Shrines until I remember those aren't fun in the Open Games.
Part of this is also me being bitter because I resent the Zelda OW games for their impact on the franchise as much as gaming at large. It took 11 years to get a new traditional styled Zelda game (between LBW in 2013 and Echoes of Wisdom in 2024). As of this post we are now further removed from the most recent Linear 3D Zelda (Skwyward Sword in November 2011) than it was from the FIRST 3D Zelda (OoT in Nov 1998), and than OoT was from the inception of the franchise (February 1986). It's also not helped by the fact that these games are turning into a small "sub-series" with a direct sequel using the same world (OoT and MM shared chronology but were in totally different settings, as were the Toon Link games. Only ALBW fits the bill up to this point) and two Musou spin-offs that just cover events mentioned-but-not-depicted to fill in the lackluster narrative (vs the original Hyrule Warriors being an outside-mainline Crossover spectacle). To draw a comparison, it's like when Final Fantasy 13 came out, proved divisive at best... and then Square gave it 2 sequels and tried tying it into other verse projects like Type-0 and Versus 13 (before that became 15). I am well aware my critical perception is probably a minority, but it's the same feeling of "I can't stand this iteration but it won't go away," probably made worse KNOWING that popularity instead of creator stubbornness is ensuring that (vs, say, the divisive newer Paper Mario games).
I get the Wild games were huge sellers, but I have absolutely no enthusiasm for their style and their existence is now starting to feel like it actively infringes on one that I DO care about since it's the Dev team putting work into a game that does not retain any of the design or "vibes" that I got invested in the IP for. SV can debate quality but I have no hesitation saying they fit right in as mainline Pokemon games, which is not something I can give to "better" Open World games like BOTW or TOTK. I wish people would stop focusing on how SV are good or bad Open World games, especially because I'm not convinved a "good" one of those even exists past the year of 2013-2015 with GTA 5 in general, or Xenoblade Chronicles X in a Nintendo specific context, and instead "Open World or not, does this design gel with the IP or is the name slapped on to sell a different idea?"
tl;dr Open World Zelda is worse than Open World Pokemon.
Speaking as someone who grew up on classic Sonic, this is a feeling you just gotta get over. Once a franchise is this long in the tooth and has offshoots into all kinds of sub-audiences, you gotta come to terms with the fact that they're no longer going to be able to please the entire audience all of the time, and that they honestly should probably never try to do so because it just runs the risk of pissing off everybody equally. Best you can hope for is that they just cycle through different approaches on a regular basis.
I'm at the point where if I get a Mania or a Superstars once every console generation or so, I'm fine with that. Sega can spend the rest of their time working on Shadow the Hedgehog edgelord shlock if they want or more movies that I'm never going to watch. That stuff has their audiences to serve. No reason we can't all eat.
But on the broader point on open world Pokemon, I do agree that SV isn't as egregious a departure from traditional franchise design as it could be. If nothing else, it is kind of nice to be able to traverse a single big map without it being broken up by multiple GB/DS era "guard houses" everywhere, and that's one small plus worth underscoring in a game that's otherwise a performance mess.
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I’m honestly of the opinion that the switch era of Pokemon has been one long experimental dev cycle building up to the tenth generation.
Look at what was shared and developed from SW/SH through to PLZA via SV and PLA and you can see how the open world and changes in gameplay have been influenced one to the other.
The bit that always gives me pause for thought is knowing that all four of these titles definitely share commonalities in their engine development - this has been extrapolated from the Tera leaks and spoken about at length on YouTube by a number of commentators.
Gen 10 I hope changes it up but absolutely takes the best of all of these forward.
Look at what was shared and developed from SW/SH through to PLZA via SV and PLA and you can see how the open world and changes in gameplay have been influenced one to the other.
The bit that always gives me pause for thought is knowing that all four of these titles definitely share commonalities in their engine development - this has been extrapolated from the Tera leaks and spoken about at length on YouTube by a number of commentators.
Gen 10 I hope changes it up but absolutely takes the best of all of these forward.
I'd say that for a fair chunk of my previous favourite Nintendo series, Pokemon included, that one new game fitting my interests each console generation would be a noticeable improvement from the Switch 1. OoT-style 3d Zelda has already been mentioned, but I'd also list its 2d equivalent (Echoes of Wisdom is still far too TotK-style for my liking) and 3d Mario in the other examples. I feel like the reasonable extension of trying to get this setup implemented for Pokemon is that gen 10 should make no attempt to be open-world given how much that style dominates gens 8 and 9.
I wouldn't go that far, but they're clearly experimenting out there and coming up with good ideas.
As much as people bash SV, that game had ambition. They were actually trying out there. Sure, there were some dumb, dumb decisions, and I'll always drag them over those, but performance issues? On a game that rushed? On a console that weak?
Nah, that's not on the devs.
SV's open world really has no purpose. At no point the game truly benefits from it.
BotW is an interesting case. The only mechanic I REALLY wish they ported to it from TOTK to the Switch 2 version is the innate weapon bonuses because weapons in BotW are kind of a bit too bland.
The mechanics are surprisingly well-thought out, the game was refreshing at a time the Zelda franchise really needed a shake up, and then... A sequel was announced. Oh boy, they'll fix all these issues that BotW had, right?
Nah, just add some bullshit Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts mechanics.
They had SIX years to understand the assignment and give us some dungeons. That was it. That was the single biggest issue with BotW. But nope.
That game is technically impressive, but maaaaaan, there's not much of a point if the decisions are dumb! This is even worse than HGSS, at least that had the excuse of being a remake!
Ima just going to ignore the SV-shaped elephant in the room and say that it's cathartic to see THAT section of loud Zelda fans constantly bashing Pokemon games, saying they're all the same, unpolished, etc etc etc, and then they just purchase the 70$ Ultra Breath of the Wild.
Loud Zelda fans are plenty obnoxious, but I don’t think this “gotcha” really holds up.
Like… look, I love Pokémon games more than any other kind of game, and I even tend to prefer the newer ones over the older ones, so I’m probably the last person who’s gonna join in on a weekly dogpile about how modern Pokémon is all just shit now. And I’ve also done my share of defending the kind of workload that Game Freak have to deal with that I think fans still don’t quite grasp. So understand that I’m saying this from a position of absolute love and appreciation for Pokémon and all the work its creators put into it, but…
… saying that Pokémon doesn’t compare to modern Zelda games is absolutely fair. The very idea that Tears of the Kingdom is just “Ultra Breath of the Wild” is frankly preposterous. USUM didn’t do a single thing that even remotely compares to the kind of technical engineering behind stuff like the Ultrahand, Ascend, or Recall abilities, and USUM didn’t add an entire shadow Alola that’s as big as the original map. Seven Ultra Hallways don’t even begin to compare to combined substance of the Depths, sky islands, and caves of TOTK.