Post your searing hot takes

LPBvgc said:
Not my hot take, but this is definitely a searing hot take (that I agree with partially).
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(We got 3DS Era Elitists before GTA6)
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I agree that SM was peak (only issue is the cutscenes, but on a first playthrough that factor isn't nearly as bad, only is really a problem in making repeat playthroughs a bit of a slog, but its still dealable with), but XY was bad. Not the worst pokemon game mind you (looking at you BDSP), but it was nowhere close to peak.
And mind you, I played these games when I was young, so even looking back I remember, man, these games are bad. And even replaying XY, they still were not good.
 
XY's biggest crime is all of the potential for something far greater that was squandered so hard and so badly.

Color me not someone who does deep-dives, because I'm not that kind of person, but I feel like if you look at... everything about XY, from the gimmick it introduced, to the story, to the gameplay, Zygarde, all of it, really, you can definitely pick out some good beats.

The problem is that the game does nothing with them or actively half-asses a way to work with them that does not do their creative potential any sort of justice. Using Mega Evolution as the most prominent example, you'd think that as the shining gimmick of the generation, they'd be featured all over the place. In reality, though, only THREE trainers actually use them in the game! [This one is actually a much larger topic than I'm willing to write about in this post, so I'll spare you that rant]

XY really reminds me of Scarlet and Violet, and honestly to some extent Sword and Shield in terms of how badly they squandered the concepts that they presented. The only difference is that there's a much stronger argument for those two in terms of quality, even in spite of their admittedly rushed dev times and the "push it now, fix it later" approach that has befallen them, whereas with XY it really feels like their low quality is genuinely inexcusable for something that's supposed to be the first 3D pokemon game.
 
LPBvgc said:
Not my hot take, but this is definitely a searing hot take (that I agree with partially).
Screenshot_2025-05-09-12-27-16-813_2.jpg

(We got 3DS Era Elitists before GTA6)
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I mean, points for being a take I don't see that often, but "unplayable due to grind" is a very funny reason to dislike the earlier generations. Sure, a lot of them will involve some tedium if you want to use a full team of six, as many people do, but unplayable? That's such an overstatement that it's driving me to sit in a rocking chair with a cane and rave about how kids these days lack grit and toughness.
 
Divine Retribution said:
I don't know if it's even a hot take but grinding =/= difficulty. Way too many people seem to think that making a game grindier makes it harder or, vice versa, that removing grinding from a game makes it easier. These are ridiculous self-evidently wrong sentiments and if you espouse them your brain is broken.
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I agree
 
Divine Retribution said:
I don't know if it's even a hot take but grinding =/= difficulty. Way too many people seem to think that making a game grindier makes it harder or, vice versa, that removing grinding from a game makes it easier. These are ridiculous self-evidently wrong sentiments and if you espouse them your brain is broken.
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Counterpoint, adding a significant amount of grinding to a game makes it harder for me, because it removes any desire for me to play the game in the first place
 
Grindiness and difficulty are not equivalent but in a lot of games grind presents itself as the easiest form of difficulty remediation. You can either analyse a battle you lost to work out what changes you need to make to your party and strategy, or you can throw yourself at fodder enemies until a number goes up. Many will choose the latter simply because it's easier, even if it is longer and more tedious. This is also why some games use methods like level caps to limit grinding.
 
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The difference between a difficult game that can be beaten by grinding and a not-difficult game that can be beaten by grinding is that the difficult game is generally the one where you can bypass any level disparity by being good enough at the game.

Too many games are either too mechanically shallow or too hit-sponge-y for that to be a reasonable option and they just end up being grinds. If the way you beat something is by being a high enough level, it's probably a sign that something needs major tweaking.

Good frame of reference is to see whether the final boss or strongest superboss can be beaten at the minimum possible level without a cheese strat.
 
Martin said:
The difference between a difficult game that can be beaten by grinding and a not-difficult game that can be beaten by grinding is that the difficult game is generally the one where you can bypass any level disparity by being good enough at the game.

Too many games are either too mechanically shallow or too hit-sponge-y for that to be a reasonable option and they just end up being grinds. If the way you beat something is by being a high enough level, it's probably a sign that something needs major tweaking.

Good frame of reference is to see whether the final boss or strongest superboss can be beaten at the minimum possible level without a cheese strat.
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Can't say I'm really a fan of excluding cheese strats, since I've seen that term encompass basically everything beyond raw numbers and/or execution for action games. If anything, I find the fact that strategies far removed from typical play can produce results as an endorsement of the game's mechanical depth.
 
I think people are overhating on fantasy worlds having maps that look like Earth

Warhammer Fantasy's map looks mostly like our world map and it's done very well because the regions of Mallus are intuitive to us. The regions are all based on regions of our world and are placed this way, like I see where Grand Cathay is on the map and I get that it's based on China, I see Lustria and I can tell that it's mostly covered by jungle

There are cases where it really sucks and where it seems lazy but I think when used right, making a fantasy map that's Earth's with some deviations can be a good idea
 
Ironmage said:
Can't say I'm really a fan of excluding cheese strats, since I've seen that term encompass basically everything beyond raw numbers and/or execution for action games. If anything, I find the fact that strategies far removed from typical play can produce results as an endorsement of the game's mechanical depth.
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When I say cheese strats, I mean things that have a low barrier of access and are just unbalanced by design/unilaterally trivialise everything/are unreasonably easy to discover on your first playthrough without spending much time with the game, like topple locking in Xenoblade 1 or whatever. Stuff where you can beat the insane stuff at minimum level because the game is poorly designed rather than due to the mechanical/strategic/etc. depth of the game leading to emergent gameplay/rewarding divergent thinking.

And for reference, Xenoblade 1 is an example of game where you can beat everything at minimum level without using that sorta cheese due to the depth and bredth of its build synergies and flexibility in how you can execute on difficult fights. It's the game I was thinking of when I added that caveat because of that deliniation between cheesing bosses with topple locking versus designing a build that is stacked with enough synergies/strong enough tools to overcome unreasonable odds without having to resort to using the lowest common denominator uninteractive broken stuff.
 
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This is only tangentially related to the ongoing discussion, but I've had it in my head since my last reply: I find that a certain amount of grinding in a game can increase my satisfaction levels when I finally overcome obstacles. It helps to build attachment to your party members when you spend some time training them in the muck, becoming intimately familiar with their strengths and weaknesses. When I roll everything without much time spent training up my party in games like X/Y, there's a level of disconnection from my party that makes winning less enjoyable for me. People tend to talk about grinding like any amount of it is bad for a game, but I really think there's a nonzero amount that is just right.
 
adjectivenoun said:
This is only tangentially related to the ongoing discussion, but I've had it in my head since my last reply: I find that a certain amount of grinding in a game can increase my satisfaction levels when I finally overcome obstacles. It helps to build attachment to your party members when you spend some time training them in the muck, becoming intimately familiar with their strengths and weaknesses. When I roll everything without much time spent training up my party in games like X/Y, there's a level of disconnection from my party that makes winning less enjoyable for me. People tend to talk about grinding like any amount of it is bad for a game, but I really think there's a nonzero amount that is just right.
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i've like, been so conceptually ready to believe this and engage in it, but in practice probably every grinding experiences i've faced has either been too frustrating or too tedious to maintain my suspension of belief

i definitely do not mean to present myself as the median experiencer of things here, but i do feel like many games are not great at striking this balance that i agree is great
 
Divine Retribution said:
I don't know if it's even a hot take but grinding =/= difficulty. Way too many people seem to think that making a game grindier makes it harder or, vice versa, that removing grinding from a game makes it easier. These are ridiculous self-evidently wrong sentiments and if you espouse them your brain is broken.
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there is like one exception in fargo's souls mod for terraria. The reason i'm hard-pressed to describe whatever the hell goes on in that mod as "grinding" is that gathering enchantments is less meaningless grinding and more getting the player to spend time outside of boss fights (and a lot of the times enchantment grinds feel more fun when compared to the boss you're preparing for) (FUCK PLANTERA)
 
Never really been a big fan of Clue Bottles in the Sly Cooper series and I don't particularly mind Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves ditching them. I only think they are pretty tolerable in the original game (Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus) by virtue of the levels being relatively small. I don't really like their inclusion in Sly 2 and 4 too much because of either muddy visuals (2) or huge environments (4). They feel like busy work for the sake of it and it doesn't help that until Sly 4 none of the upgrades barring a couple exceptions are anything worth getting excited over. Not helping is that two different Sly 4 levels prevent you from getting all the bottles until you get certain costumes (why why why).

While we're on the subject, I feel like Sly 2 is somewhat inconsistent. On the one hand, stuff like Episode 6 is basically perfect, and some other chapters like 1, 4 and 8 turn in pretty good showings (2 and 7 are just kinda there). On the other hand, Episodes 3 and 5 are just...not very fun to play. Both chapters have insanely convoluted vertical overworlds that make traversal not fun, and if you're like me and get every bottle because of OCD it's even worse. I also think that as impressive as the plot is in scope, not every villain needs two episodes (4 and 5 I feel like can get away with it because the plot is that strong).

Weirdly, I think my favorite game in the series might be the original Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. What it lacks in a health meter and plot depth, it makes up for with simple pick-up-and-play appeal. My main issue with Sly 3 is that it makes the ThiefNet upgrades so expensive but also makes them borderline irrelevant at the same time because of all the unexpected gameplay changes (Bentley's upgrades in 4 have similar issues thanks to all the minigames but I don't think the upgrades were costly). Sly 4 has amazingly refined gameplay in exchange for also having one of the most controversial plot twists of all time (if you know, you know).
 
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The ability patch thing in Ideas You Had reminded me that I really hate infinite-reuse TMs, and I wish that they'd kept them single use but added a disc burner in the postgame or something to appease the people who complain about single-use TMs.

Infinite reuse TMs just homogenises every Pokémon/moveset in playthroughs, which is very boring. One of the cool things about single-use TMs is that you can have a gym leader give out something that's a bit broken for the point in the game when you get it but then it's the only one that's available without *completely* breaking the game.

When they do that with infinite reuse stuff (which they keep doing in increasingly egregious ways btw…), it kinda undermines level-up movepools and means that particularly high-value early TMs with wide distribution like Return, Work Up, U-turn, Dig etc. just get slapped onto everything until there's a good reason to overwrite it again (why bother with any of these filler midgame Normal-type moves when you can just use Return with no trade-off?), whereas in e.g. gen 4 you'd have to choose one Pokémon to teach it to, which was generally something that you'd expect to keep it for the whole game.
 
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Having played some Gen 3/4 based ROM hacks recently, I can definitely see limited-use TMs as a form of resource management for challenge runs, but at the end of the day I think that argument is undermined by the fact that Pokemon isn't a remotely challenging game in the first place unless you add your own self-imposed restrictions to it. Stock up on revives and full restores and it's basically impossible to lose, so most players who are doing any kind of challenge run or care about difficulty in general will restrict themselves from using these items. There's no reason you can't also impose the restriction of only using each TM once on yourself. Any difficulty in Pokemon is already self-imposed.
 
Bakugames said:
my issue with tms is that in resource management stuff you tend to be able to move, realocate and decide on your resources. with single tm moves, you got one shot and if it ends up that there was a better option later on then L + ratio on you
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That's just... not always true. Sometimes games allow you to respec resources you've already invested, sometimes they don't. Sometimes you use a limited resource to get past a particularly challenging section or boss and it turns out it would have been really, really helpful later in the game if you had saved it. That's part of what resource management is honestly; assessing whether or not it's worthwhile to invest a resource now or try to save it for a harder section later on.
 
This whole convo had me thinking that a possible way for TMs to work is to have them only need to be obtained once, but you can only have the given TM move on one mon (as in reusing the TM will clear the move from the pokemon that previously had it and then lets you put it on someone else). This makes actually using them a lot less of a major decision but won't trivialize gyms/bosses by letting you put a super effective move on 5/6 team members.

Then in the postgame you can get an item that removes this limit for competitive teambuilding purposes.
 
Martin said:
The ability patch thing in Ideas You Had reminded me that I really hate infinite-reuse TMs, and I wish that they'd kept them single use but added a disc burner in the postgame or something to appease the people who complain about single-use TMs.

Infinite reuse TMs just homogenises every Pokémon/moveset in playthroughs, which is very boring. One of the cool things about single-use TMs is that you can have a gym leader give out something that's a bit broken for the point in the game when you get it but then it's the only one that's available without *completely* breaking the game.

When they do that with infinite reuse stuff (which they keep doing in increasingly egregious ways btw…), it kinda undermines level-up movepools and means that particularly high-value early TMs with wide distribution like Return, Work Up, U-turn, Dig etc. just get slapped onto everything until there's a good reason to overwrite it again (why bother with any of these filler midgame Normal-type moves when you can just use Return with no trade-off?), whereas in e.g. gen 4 you'd have to choose one Pokémon to teach it to, which was generally something that you'd expect to keep it for the whole game.
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(Do my eyes deceive me? Me making a positive comment about Sword & Shield? That never happens.)

One of the things I liked about Sword & Shield were that they sort of had a solution to this…? TMs retained unlimited use, but they also added TRs that were limited use and generally for the stronger, more viable moves. It wasn’t a system I appreciated in full until Scarlet & Violet got rid of it in favor of crafting limited use TMs because every open world game needs crafting mechanics, I guess. The more options of ways to do things the player is given, the better. Sword & Shield did it right by making an attempt to appeal to both sides of the “Should TMs be unlimited use?” debate at the same time.
 
I'm not a huge fan of resource management gameplay since it ends up harder to balance with the player having taken an unknown amount of attrition before each fight. I'd rather give the opportunity for the enemies to be designed to go all-out against a known to be full-strength player team. A single active 'license' for a TM move could be interesting, but I vastly prefer infinite TMs over consumable ones.
 
A good number of issues with reusable TMs being too strong can be avoided by not giving the player TM27 Return, the best global TM for casual Pokemon, before gym 2. Which happened twice by the way.
 
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