What fucking nuzlockers are you watching? Whoever it is they deserve a smack upside the head. Most I've seen don't use items at all.
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(Little) Things that annoy you in Pokémon
- Thread starter BriarRose
- Start date
I've beaten Thousand Year Door + Origami King, and am playing through Color Splash right now - and I think there is a bit more to discuss here than this.
- I really liked Thousand Year Door, but when playing it, I did notice that the method of progression was certainly more inorganic compared to most standard RPGs. What I mean is that you aren't necessarily getting stronger in a traditional way by leveling up - you get the option of either increasinng your bulk (HP) or increasing the amount of gear / special moves you can use, which makes you "stronger", but it really depends on how you allocate the resources, which is going to vary wildly between what a novice or more technical player will do. Of course, between partners, star powers, partner upgrades, etc, there are a lot of progression systems in the game that don't even rely on levels. For this reason, when playing the game, I understood why they ditched the leveling system in future games.
- Origami King was also a fun game & I found myself getting into battles a lot because I really liked the puzzle combat. For me the ring puzzles could get quite tricky - so I would replay battles quite a bit to try and solving the puzzles on my own (without relying on the cheat command lol). I personally liked the huge coin bonus these battles provided because there were a lot of items in the shop I wanted to buy. However, this probably varies based on person to person. For me - my biggest issues with the combat were a lack of HP or damage visualization before using your items because it was difficult to know whether or not an attack would kill or not (you just had to vibe it out)
- On this note though - I do feel another issue with Origami King was that there weren't any real non-level based progression systems besides I guess the limited weapons and some badges - most of which didn't exactly change how you played the game. Ideal you should have gotten new moves or abilities as you progressed through the game.
- I've only got 2 paint stars, but imo Color Splash's combat is just bad and something I straight up want to avoid - not because I lose resources but because it is very slow. You have somewhat of an incentive to battle there with like - getting hammer scraps, but imo whether or not there is an incentive is less of an issue than the battles just outright being boring. I also feel like battles in this game are moreso meant to be an obstacle and are intentionally meant to be avoided while exploring areas, rather than an engaging mechanic on their own.
For Pokemon - I think there actually are enough alternative systems in place that leveling isn't neccessary. TM Access (either permanent or the variation with Pokemon materials), Pokemon Evolution (and move access), the egg move mechanic in SV, available capturable Pokemon, availible items, move tutors, EVs and in some cases other mechanics like Tera or Mega Evolution are all good progression systems in their own right. That said, I think the way Pokemon currently handles its leveling system in modern games is also largely fine. You largely keep pace with the level curve without the need for grinding.
Once again I think any issues I have with the leveling system is mostly at the hands of "just let me turn exp share off". That's it. That's all I need. All the scaffolding associated with leveling functions fine, just lemme turn it off again. you can even keep it on by default, it's not like I want to get rid of it.
Though I will say SV probably did it best just because all battles were "opt-in" on an open world. There came a point where I just felt naturally inclined to not do as many battles since I just wanted to move on; meanwhile in my excursions in the post game I stumbled upon big chunks I never went to before full of trainers. I hope if WIWa insists on not letting me turn it off it keeps that up (Z-A was compromised because I picked up the canari dolls but it was fine for most of it).
Anyway I want to complain about the completionist nightmare that is Pokopia's item catalog.
There is so much RNG that you just don't get to really work around:
Though I will say SV probably did it best just because all battles were "opt-in" on an open world. There came a point where I just felt naturally inclined to not do as many battles since I just wanted to move on; meanwhile in my excursions in the post game I stumbled upon big chunks I never went to before full of trainers. I hope if WIWa insists on not letting me turn it off it keeps that up (Z-A was compromised because I picked up the canari dolls but it was fine for most of it).
Anyway I want to complain about the completionist nightmare that is Pokopia's item catalog.
There is so much RNG that you just don't get to really work around:
- Recipes are probably the least egregious. Most of the the "random" ones are in sparkle spots and those are frequent and a few Mosslax boosts can clean up the remainder. The real problem are the shop-exclusives; you can often only see up to 2 a day and there can for some reason be repeats. Your only ability to offset this is using Cloud Islands, which let you see another line up. I guess the upshot of repeats is you could go to someone else's cloud island but no one really does that. But at least the pool is small
- Dream Island Legendaries. Every Dream island has an associated Legendary that only has a chance to show up. We don't know exact odds but it can be pretty rough. You can SR for this (set the pokedex mode to display Everything and In This Area, it will display you, drifloon and any legend that might be present) but games these days are not snappy reloads so it still gets tedious. Still better than going weeks or months without one.
- Photo opportunities require either specific Pokemon interacting or Pokemon interacting with specific items. Depending on how you set up your areas and what Pokemon are out & about this is about doing specific set ups and hoping the photo op happens in a spot you can take a photo of (the other day I had a photo op show up but by the time I could get out I missed it)
- Music CDs! You can only find these in "glowing block" spots, which oh boy do I have problems there. But they are at least frequent; that's the only good thing about them. There's a lot of them and there's nothing you can do to try and get more; they don't even show up in shops and although they are items you can "display" there's no way to 3D Print the ones you're missing.
- Speaking of 3D Printing let me complain about the Artifact catalog. See all the Artifacts aren't just in the Item List, they have their own extra category that specifically tracks identifying them. So if you 3d Print an Avalugg Table, that will go in the Item List but not the Artifact List. This means you have to subject yourself to the RNG of glowy blocks giving you the item you want and then you have to get them identified to see if you actually got the one you want. You can't SR this so it's just extra busy work. But it's just as well because the like 50 items that you only get from the Small relics can't be printed or bought at all. And on top of all that I've not mentioned that the pool of Glowy Spot items is huge; Large Relics, Small Relics, CDs (over 50 now), Dolls, Mysterious Slates (28 of them!). So even with a Mosslax boost you're just doing an uphill battle
- Dream Islands return! There's a ton of documents that you can only get on Dream Islands and majority of Dream Islands only spawn 1 document spot per day (two, if you have a cloud island) and it seems entirely RNG. You can't SR for these like the Legends; the game autosaves once you start moving and there's no way to tell that a new document is present without going to the center of the map. Outside of the new Starmie documents, I don't believe specific documents are on specific islands. Pokopia in general feels like it's had minimal research done on some of these things...
- Pokemon sometimes run up & give you gifts, usually just crafting materials. But Chef Greedent specifically has 3 special items only she can give and yeah I'm still missing one of them. If you're just not in the area when she's around you'll never have a shot to have her run up, and run ups are completely random. No you can't 3D Print them.
The thing is, battles are fun. Battling should be the point of the franchise, I shouldn't be skipping fights.
ZA I figured out, just run a team of like 10-12 mons and you're probably fine, which makes the ZA Royale a bit more interesting as well as you adjust your team on the fly to meet specific goals. But that's a patch on a series which traditionally across all media focuses on a team of 6 with occasional substitutions.
I mean true, but RPGs aren't (and shouldn't be) entirely about battles and sometimes you want to just explore an area. Being able to disengage from combat easily to poke around is a good thing, even if I hate some aspects of how SV handles encounters.
Yeah basically this I'm not skipping fights because I felt I needed to (that was what I attempted in SWSH and it didn't even work out so it wasn't worth doing), I was skipping fights because I didn't feel like seeking them out and was excited to move on. It felt very natural. Especially when I thought I did clear out an area and then turns out I just didn't swing the camera over to the left a few more degress lmao.
One thing that annoys me about online play is that despite it going on for nearly 7 YEARS, Nintendo or TPCi has barely done anything about the rampant self-promotion that goes on online. Like is adding ".com" or ".co" to the banned word list or the illegal mon attribute list that hard?
Every time I see this card it looks so tasty and makes me want a big soft serve ice cream but I don't have a big soft serve ice cream and then I am sad.
I wanna continue dialogue with ant because he's making good points and has come across a design conundrum I have also noticed and think is worth exploring about EXP and Levels in Pokemon. Because yeah, EXP and the Level system in Pokemon are becoming increasingly vestigial systems to the overall gameplay loop, and I think it will inform the way future games are designed.
The core thing Experience Point systems do in RPGs is reward time investments put into engaging with the game's systems that are independent of a player's tangible game knowledge. This was a mechanic designed to offset the value of knowledge from sources outside the game itself. Maybe you have a friend who played the game and knows where all the good loot in the dungeons are, maybe you have meta knowledge about the medium you are playing or the limitations of the hardware you are playing on, or maybe you are just blatantly utilizing a source of factual data on the game. (Nowadays this would be a Wiki, before it would probably be a strategy guide, at the time the mechanic was created it might even be people just reading the code!) This outside information advantage often ends up snowballing and rapidly sanding down the edges off of a game. If a player makes a correct choice at every junction, even in situations designed to be ambiguous to blind players, it can be hard to give those players the same kind of experience as those playing with outside information. Your adventure will end up less interesting, with less hardships and fewer opportunities to have exciting moments. On the other hand, players who truly engage with the Role Playing Game fantasy and do take on the experience blindly can feel punished in situations where their progress is undone due to poor choices. There can be simple mistakes like wasting money on poor gear, a bit more frustrating situations like using a rare item in a situation where it does not matter, or dramatic situations where a player gets 80% to the end of a long portion of a game only to need to start it over from the beginning. Engaging with these failures and retreading ground is a much bigger problem in Role Playing Video Games compared to, say, Tabletop RPGs because Video Games have very defined limits in their flexibility as "Dungeon Masters", so to speak. Chief among the things a Video Game can't do is read the room.
An Experience Point / Level System brings the experiences of players at the extreme ends of this paradigm closer to one another. A player stumbling blindly through a game that struggles and persists is rewarded for that engagement by becoming stronger in battle over time, which makes further battles easier, and ultimately smooths out the friction toward their further progress as they engage with the systems repeatedly. A player with plentiful background knowledge will likely spend much less time engaging in battles and will have less difficulty winning the fights they do take. They will acquire less Experience, gain fewer Levels, and then be put into situations where the advantages of that background knowledge is more crucial to leverage in order to continue progressing through the game.
Where these systems fall apart is when the median amount of design the systems push players towards stop really helping them engage with the game in more interesting ways. A super common form of this in older games was caused by the incentive towards making games take longer to finish. Elements of the industry like prices being much higher, consumers having access to a much smaller number of games, a desire to sell Strategy Guides, a desire to play well with Game Rentals, a gaming public less exposed to vapid skinner box gameplay loops, and even the general increased willingness to engage with the process of slowly learning all the subtleties of a simple system of past players (one might call "increased attention spans") created a situation where developers were more likely to err on the side of making games take too long to beat rather than too short, and in RPGs the easiest adjustment to force players to spend more time on a game in order to complete it is to make it take longer to Level Up to reach benchmarks that allow players to progress, or at least have a reasonable chance at being able to with their available tools. These kinds of numbers tweaks can make or break a game when done haphazardly, and many older games do not hold up under scrutiny today due to their poor juggling of story pacing, gameplay complexity, and level curve for the average player.
Pokemon has always veered to toward the very most permissive end of this scale relative to its contemporaries. There are the very straightforward ways EXP is made infinitely accessible and especially safe and consistent to access thanks to infinite free healing resources, and there is also the relatively rare case with Pokemon that even the most complete failures a player can endure in battle will result in them keeping the EXP they had gained with no need to restore a previous save file. I think most of all, though, the games being so expansive in scope / objectives and having such specific ways to means that they interact well with the variable difficulty function of these Leveling systems. Much of this works because of Pokemon's position as a Lifestyle Game. In other words, players that are expected to spend time in the game working towards various tasks that are only adjacent to the core battle system can incidentally make progress towards the long term goals associated with the battle system in the meantime by doing optional battles for extra EXP, finding items, learning more about various Pokemon that can be applied to battle later, and so on. But most systems in these games can't be completely detached from Levels and Moves and Experience. Even ignoring the up front way that access to areas of the map are restricted by access to Badges during the main story, there's things like Contests requiring Pokemon to get Levels to access strong moves or needing Pokemon with high stats to efficiently catch rare Pokemon once found. On top of this, while these ways to spend time do tend to result in gaining advantages in the Battle System, they don't really create a comprehensive gameplay loop. In a lot of cases, I'm making a suspect assumption on the game's behalf that players will naturally gain EXP on their Pokemon while exploring the overworld by fighting against Trainers or Wild Pokemon, and that's far from a constant truth. Catching Pokemon for EXP Consider that in a game as deeply ingrained with Multiplayer as Pokemon, it's only starting in Generations 8 and 9 with Dynamax and Tera Raid Dens that players were able to engage in a multiplayer gameplay event that could come anywhere close to directly giving the player progress on the main story in terms of Leveling and Experience through EXP Candies and TRs / the Pokemon Materials system. In Generation 9 especially the lack of required Trainer Battles or real Level Design in the open world makes this seem more like it's a part of the intended balance for the game. So while the Lifestyle Game Elements do tend to counterbalance the biggest pitfalls of the Experience System, they do so incompletely. I think it's not for nothing that some of the games I find to have the best design as a Singleplayer RPG (RBY/FRLG, RSE, BW1+2, SuMo... kind of just the Odd Numbered Generations overall?) are the games which have the most lackluster implementation of Lifestyle Game elements and the worst integration of Multiplayer.
With Wind and Waves on the horizon, Champions established as a hosting ground for Competitive play that the main game developers no long have to worry about, I think a really big focus of Generation 10 is going to be finding a way to make for avenues of progression independent from gaining power for battles via Experience and Levels. (I will continue I am out of time and accidentally posted)
The core thing Experience Point systems do in RPGs is reward time investments put into engaging with the game's systems that are independent of a player's tangible game knowledge. This was a mechanic designed to offset the value of knowledge from sources outside the game itself. Maybe you have a friend who played the game and knows where all the good loot in the dungeons are, maybe you have meta knowledge about the medium you are playing or the limitations of the hardware you are playing on, or maybe you are just blatantly utilizing a source of factual data on the game. (Nowadays this would be a Wiki, before it would probably be a strategy guide, at the time the mechanic was created it might even be people just reading the code!) This outside information advantage often ends up snowballing and rapidly sanding down the edges off of a game. If a player makes a correct choice at every junction, even in situations designed to be ambiguous to blind players, it can be hard to give those players the same kind of experience as those playing with outside information. Your adventure will end up less interesting, with less hardships and fewer opportunities to have exciting moments. On the other hand, players who truly engage with the Role Playing Game fantasy and do take on the experience blindly can feel punished in situations where their progress is undone due to poor choices. There can be simple mistakes like wasting money on poor gear, a bit more frustrating situations like using a rare item in a situation where it does not matter, or dramatic situations where a player gets 80% to the end of a long portion of a game only to need to start it over from the beginning. Engaging with these failures and retreading ground is a much bigger problem in Role Playing Video Games compared to, say, Tabletop RPGs because Video Games have very defined limits in their flexibility as "Dungeon Masters", so to speak. Chief among the things a Video Game can't do is read the room.
An Experience Point / Level System brings the experiences of players at the extreme ends of this paradigm closer to one another. A player stumbling blindly through a game that struggles and persists is rewarded for that engagement by becoming stronger in battle over time, which makes further battles easier, and ultimately smooths out the friction toward their further progress as they engage with the systems repeatedly. A player with plentiful background knowledge will likely spend much less time engaging in battles and will have less difficulty winning the fights they do take. They will acquire less Experience, gain fewer Levels, and then be put into situations where the advantages of that background knowledge is more crucial to leverage in order to continue progressing through the game.
Where these systems fall apart is when the median amount of design the systems push players towards stop really helping them engage with the game in more interesting ways. A super common form of this in older games was caused by the incentive towards making games take longer to finish. Elements of the industry like prices being much higher, consumers having access to a much smaller number of games, a desire to sell Strategy Guides, a desire to play well with Game Rentals, a gaming public less exposed to vapid skinner box gameplay loops, and even the general increased willingness to engage with the process of slowly learning all the subtleties of a simple system of past players (one might call "increased attention spans") created a situation where developers were more likely to err on the side of making games take too long to beat rather than too short, and in RPGs the easiest adjustment to force players to spend more time on a game in order to complete it is to make it take longer to Level Up to reach benchmarks that allow players to progress, or at least have a reasonable chance at being able to with their available tools. These kinds of numbers tweaks can make or break a game when done haphazardly, and many older games do not hold up under scrutiny today due to their poor juggling of story pacing, gameplay complexity, and level curve for the average player.
Pokemon has always veered to toward the very most permissive end of this scale relative to its contemporaries. There are the very straightforward ways EXP is made infinitely accessible and especially safe and consistent to access thanks to infinite free healing resources, and there is also the relatively rare case with Pokemon that even the most complete failures a player can endure in battle will result in them keeping the EXP they had gained with no need to restore a previous save file. I think most of all, though, the games being so expansive in scope / objectives and having such specific ways to means that they interact well with the variable difficulty function of these Leveling systems. Much of this works because of Pokemon's position as a Lifestyle Game. In other words, players that are expected to spend time in the game working towards various tasks that are only adjacent to the core battle system can incidentally make progress towards the long term goals associated with the battle system in the meantime by doing optional battles for extra EXP, finding items, learning more about various Pokemon that can be applied to battle later, and so on. But most systems in these games can't be completely detached from Levels and Moves and Experience. Even ignoring the up front way that access to areas of the map are restricted by access to Badges during the main story, there's things like Contests requiring Pokemon to get Levels to access strong moves or needing Pokemon with high stats to efficiently catch rare Pokemon once found. On top of this, while these ways to spend time do tend to result in gaining advantages in the Battle System, they don't really create a comprehensive gameplay loop. In a lot of cases, I'm making a suspect assumption on the game's behalf that players will naturally gain EXP on their Pokemon while exploring the overworld by fighting against Trainers or Wild Pokemon, and that's far from a constant truth. Catching Pokemon for EXP Consider that in a game as deeply ingrained with Multiplayer as Pokemon, it's only starting in Generations 8 and 9 with Dynamax and Tera Raid Dens that players were able to engage in a multiplayer gameplay event that could come anywhere close to directly giving the player progress on the main story in terms of Leveling and Experience through EXP Candies and TRs / the Pokemon Materials system. In Generation 9 especially the lack of required Trainer Battles or real Level Design in the open world makes this seem more like it's a part of the intended balance for the game. So while the Lifestyle Game Elements do tend to counterbalance the biggest pitfalls of the Experience System, they do so incompletely. I think it's not for nothing that some of the games I find to have the best design as a Singleplayer RPG (RBY/FRLG, RSE, BW1+2, SuMo... kind of just the Odd Numbered Generations overall?) are the games which have the most lackluster implementation of Lifestyle Game elements and the worst integration of Multiplayer.
With Wind and Waves on the horizon, Champions established as a hosting ground for Competitive play that the main game developers no long have to worry about, I think a really big focus of Generation 10 is going to be finding a way to make for avenues of progression independent from gaining power for battles via Experience and Levels. (I will continue I am out of time and accidentally posted)
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I am using Duraludon in SS playthough & I don't get why its level up movepool is so bad. You practically need limited use TRs to give it a workable end game learn set. Its still good in early game because of its stats, but they should have given it some weak special moves by level up like Dragon Breath or Mirror Shot.
SS kind of loves making you use limited TRs. If you interact with the systems that give you those a lot of mons are very good, and if you don't those same mons are terrible. Coalossal is my favorite example, since it has balanced offenses and basically any TR for it's STABs or coverage are excellent, but it's level-up movepool maxes out at 60 BP with STABs only until you're in the 50's(and still sucks).
The C in V-create is not capitalized.
Wind Rider does not interact with Sandstorm or the Sand weather effect in any way.
This is despite the fact that 1.) the game already classifies Sandstorm as a wind move and 2.) the Pokémon line that first got the ability is based on the tumbleweed. An object heavily associated with deserts and, by extension, sandstorms.
It's not like Wind Rider giving Sand damage immunity like Sand Veil and/or having the same interaction as Tailwind would be super broken. I'd argue it would be quite cool and give Sand teams more of a reason to use one of the two Grass-types that get Wind Rider.
Also fwiw I have actually seen tumbleweeds flying around during sandstorms in Palm Springs lol. So it's not even unrealistic.
This is despite the fact that 1.) the game already classifies Sandstorm as a wind move and 2.) the Pokémon line that first got the ability is based on the tumbleweed. An object heavily associated with deserts and, by extension, sandstorms.
It's not like Wind Rider giving Sand damage immunity like Sand Veil and/or having the same interaction as Tailwind would be super broken. I'd argue it would be quite cool and give Sand teams more of a reason to use one of the two Grass-types that get Wind Rider.
Also fwiw I have actually seen tumbleweeds flying around during sandstorms in Palm Springs lol. So it's not even unrealistic.
It seems like a slam dunk since Grass synergizes well with Sand by dealing with Water and the Rock/Ground focus discouraging Fire (especially SpA Fire) and to a lesser extent Flying and Bug. Not even a matter of if it works in practice, we have multiple Sand-themed Grass types between the tumbleweed and the Cacti
While we're at it, why isn't Defog a wind move? It's flavoured as blowing away the obstacles and is copied into GMax Wind Rage. Letting Wind Rider absorb it would both be nice mechanically (Defog interaction without the overreach of Good as Gold) and flavourfully (the last thing it should be doing is making the tumbleweed easier to hit).
In addition, Sandstorm is apparently counted as a Wind move (according to Sandstorms entry on Bulbapedia). But it’s specifically not able to interact with Wind Rider or Wind Power. I have to wonder if it’s because of a programming quark where Sandstorm reactivating the effect every turn caused the Wind abilities to reactivate
Bulbapedia supposes that its because it doesn't target a Pokemon and is instead a field effect
But at that point you'd think they would make a special exception like with Tailwind, yeah?
Tailwind targets the user's side, Sandstorm targets the field.
Honestly I'm pretty sure it's more that Sandstorm can be triggered by other things like Sand Stream, Sand Spit, and technically Max Rockfall that's why they didn't have the Sandstorm being active boost like an active Tailwind does.
That is literally the first point I brought up.
I feel like an easy fix would be to have Sand give the Attack boost only once while the Wind Rider user is on the field so weather wars don't lead to a bunch of boosts.
Tbh considering the Wind Rider pokemon aren't that good... honestly wouldn't it be a good thing if it'd get +1 attack every time Sandstorm is reapplied? Would actually be a interesting deterrent from changing weather.
"I could swap in Pelipper to set rain, but then if they swap back in Tyranitar then it's at +2 now"
While I did think Flame Orb sets on various guts Pokémon like Heracross, Conkeldurr, & Machamp were pretty cool, I kinda don't like how it basically made this group of Fighters the same, where they run the same set of Facade, Knock Off, and CC + one filler move. Prior to the burn change, I felt this group of Pokémon were more varied. Conkeldurr had a very amazing AoA set it could leverage in gen 5 using its coverage with Ice Punch and Thunder Punch, which got super boosted by Sheer Force LO or Iron Fist. Machamp was basically a cheeser, but no guard dynamic punch at least made it unique. Heracross was once an interesting wallbreaker that could leverage skill link as mega for unique coverage, clean with scarf, or run a bulkier SD set. In gen 9, loaded dice could let it larp as it's mega at least.
That said with Guts being op, it's reasonable to pass up on these interesting options now, which is a shame.
That said with Guts being op, it's reasonable to pass up on these interesting options now, which is a shame.
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My understanding is that Conkeldurr generally prefers tanky Drain Punch sets to aggressive Close Combat ones, even when running Flame Orb. I'd consider Scarf Heracross to still be relevant as well. Machamp could probably use a new trick, though.
I feel like the issue partially comes down to Knock Off and Close Combat being too common. Obviously Facade shows up, Guts is its only real use case. But then most physical attackers that can run Knock Off and CC will do so regardless of what else the set is doing. So if you want more of these mons to run something else, you probably have to limit their access to one of those two. I lean towards hitting CC first. Back in my day, you were content with Superpower or High Jump Kick.