Unpopular opinions

My unpopular opinion: powerful mainstay moves like Dark Pulse shouldn't have percentage-chance secondary effects. At all. There should be a tradeoff between staple power moves and less powerful (or less commonly distributed) moves with a chance of causing a secondary effect. I get that they want a certain level of randomness. But with power creep making every turn matter in competitive play, losing a turn or randomly getting your Pokemon crippled with a status effect isn't just an obstacle to overcome. A free turn or -1 on a relevant stat gives your opponent such an overwhelming momentum advantage that you might as well concede on the spot.
 
Here's an unpopular opinion: Unova's circular, railroading region design isn't that bad to me, especially compared to other games. This is going to be a long post, and it will cover all the times you can go off the beaten path in all the main games save for the postgame (in every game save briefly Johto) which in almost all games are pretty plotless save ORAS and USUM, and by definition optional if you just want to beat the games and be done with them.
A very nice, long read, but I feel I should chime in with one aspect you didn't consider: the opening of shortcuts later on, making the region traversable by foot, which again means you won't need Fly if you want to revisit areas quickly. The option to hop on your bike instead of teleporting from place to place makes players experience the region more, revisiting or at least passing by the places the region has to offer. At least for me, it makes me feel more at home in the region, I get to see its various locations instead of the Fly cutscene over and over again.

Kanto is especially notable here, with the map opening up for travel between most cities (save Pallet, Viridian and Cinnabar) within a couple of minutes (although you have to have a Repel and Cut if you want to get to Pewter quickly from the central areas). In Johto, you can also bike pretty quickly between Violet, Goldenrod, Ecruteak, Olivine and to some degree Mahogany (again, Repel is needed for the latter). Hoenn has Rusturf Tunnel, Cycling Road, the surf bits of Route 103, and a convenient boat service between Slateport and Lilycove to make most cities connected pretty quickly.

Sinnoh is where this started to fail. Not only were the areas of postgame interest placed on diametrically opposite sides of the map (Pal Park, the Battle Tower and the Day Care), but there were really few cities you could walk between without traversing lengthy routes (possibly full of unavoidable grass), or caves, or those god-awful HM barriers or Mount Coronet which featured unholy amounts of all three. You needed tons of Repels and HM slaves to go anywhere over land in Sinnoh, which makes this my least favourite region to date.

Skipping Unova for a second, Kalos has very little in the way of quick travel too, but the hub-and-spokes layout of Lumiose City and its surrounding areas puts many cities within a short bike ride, and Connecting Cave lets you go from Camphrier/Battle Chateau to Cyllage pretty quickly. If only the Couriway rail station had been functional, you could have traveled quickly from Lumiose to the three cities clustered in the east pretty fast too. Still, it's not a very pedestrian-friendly region all things considered.

Alola has very few settlements, and the biggest ones can all be reached with a ferry, so it's doing fine in this regard. The first couple of islands are also easy enough to circumnavigate on foot. However, only one shortcut really opens as the game progresses, the one that lets you reach Royal Avenue from Heahea City without passing through Paniola Town.

Unova's big circle is mostly easy to traverse (Twist Mountain and Chargestone Cave form a tedious barrier around Mistralton City, but it's the only really isolated town), but there is nothing to reduce the distances between cities, meaning you'll be biking for a while to get anywhere. The distance between Nimbasa and Opelucid is short as the crow flies, but you'll have to pass through six routes, three towns and two bridges to get from one to the other. True, there is no unavoidable grass between the two cities (as long as you have Cut for Route 13), but it's a very long way to go. To a lesser extent, this is also true for the areas you want to travel between in the late-game, like the Day Care, the PWT, Join Avenue and Battle Subway. Again, no unavoidable grass between them, but it's the same long trek every time.

As each individual route is well suited for overland travel (no unavoidable grass, hooray!), I may still opt for a bike when traversing Unova, but while doing so I keep pining for some shortcuts. If only the Battle Subway had a functional line!
 
This discrepancy is due to entalphy, if I'm not mistaken. It takes a whole lot of energy to change the temperature of water, since it has such a high thermal capacity. And it takes a lot more energy to freeze water. But it doesn't take that much to change the temperature of ice, its heat capacity is approximately half that of water per kilogram. So if you mix 1 kg water at 10 *C and 1 kg ice at -10 *C, the ice will be heated to zero degrees and some of it will melt, instead of the water cooled to freeze. You need twice as much ice as water for the ice temperature to matter more than the water temperature.

In other words: Pour ice into water, and it won't freeze unless you have a lot of ice or it's really cold. Pour water onto ice, and the ice will melt. Hence why Ice is NVE against Water, but Water is normally effective against Ice.

Also, I agree that Ice needs help, but I don't consider the type chart the most pressing issue. The in-game availability of Ice-types is significantly worse than that of all other types, Ice-types tend to evolve really late, there are almost no Ice-types with the stats to use the excellent Special moves such as Ice Beam or Blizzard effectively (hence they are more used as coverage moves by other Pokémon types), there are Ice-types with good physical stats, but no good physical Ice-type moves to use with them, and the stat build of Ice-type Pokémon still veers towards "slow and bulky" when the type chart performance of the type screams "glass cannon". Ice is also the rarest type overall, one of the five types that have not been used on starter Pokémon or their available evolutions (you can start with Eevee in two games, XD and LGE, but neither of them feature Glaceon), the only type with fewer than five three-stage evolution families (it has three), and the type that has been combined with the fewest other types, after Normal. Changing its type chart performance would only make it moderately less sucky, it needs some serious attention to be up to par with literally any other type.
That could be the explanation, but it seems oddly scientific for a pokemon game, especially considering the physics in the pokemon universe aren't the same as in the real world. By the way, how would Freeze-dry work?

I do think ice needs at least one more resistance to help the older slow ice types a bit. Water is probably one of the best types to make weak against ice because water is so good anyway. I also agree that GF should design more offensive ice types, but considering the abomination that was crabominable, I'm not so sure that GF even knows that the ice type is supposed to be a glass canon type.

I also find it weird how types like ice and dragon are still strictly only available in the late game. Pokemon like swinub and spheal are perfect for distribution in the early game, yet they are always available late game when you likely have a full team already. And if you don't, these ice types will be underleveled.
 
I also find it weird how types like ice and dragon are still strictly only available in the late game. Pokemon like swinub and spheal are perfect for distribution in the early game, yet they are always available late game when you likely have a full team already. And if you don't, these ice types will be underleveled.
Perfect for distribution in the early game (the stats of Swinub is just between those of Rattata and Pidgey) ...aside from horrendously late evolution. Spheal evolves at level 32, Swinub at level 33. Those Pokémon were assigned very high evolution levels to fit with their given role as late-game Pokémon, ensuring that their performance in the early-mid game would be pretty terrible. Imagine a Rattata that retained its poor stats until your starter reached its fully evolved form, and then still didn't evolve fully until twelve levels later. A slight tweaking of evolution levels would be necessary for these two to work as early-game Pokémon (like the Whismur family, which evolves at levels 20 and 40). Or rather, entirely new three-stage Ice-types could be created, with more sensible evolution levels, as Ice has half as many three-stage families as any other type except Ghost as it is now.
 
A very nice, long read, but I feel I should chime in with one aspect you didn't consider: the opening of shortcuts later on, making the region traversable by foot, which again means you won't need Fly if you want to revisit areas quickly. The option to hop on your bike instead of teleporting from place to place makes players experience the region more, revisiting or at least passing by the places the region has to offer. At least for me, it makes me feel more at home in the region, I get to see its various locations instead of the Fly cutscene over and over again.

Kanto is especially notable here, with the map opening up for travel between most cities (save Pallet, Viridian and Cinnabar) within a couple of minutes (although you have to have a Repel and Cut if you want to get to Pewter quickly from the central areas). In Johto, you can also bike pretty quickly between Violet, Goldenrod, Ecruteak, Olivine and to some degree Mahogany (again, Repel is needed for the latter). Hoenn has Rusturf Tunnel, Cycling Road, the surf bits of Route 103, and a convenient boat service between Slateport and Lilycove to make most cities connected pretty quickly.

Sinnoh is where this started to fail. Not only were the areas of postgame interest placed on diametrically opposite sides of the map (Pal Park, the Battle Tower and the Day Care), but there were really few cities you could walk between without traversing lengthy routes (possibly full of unavoidable grass), or caves, or those god-awful HM barriers or Mount Coronet which featured unholy amounts of all three. You needed tons of Repels and HM slaves to go anywhere over land in Sinnoh, which makes this my least favourite region to date.

Skipping Unova for a second, Kalos has very little in the way of quick travel too, but the hub-and-spokes layout of Lumiose City and its surrounding areas puts many cities within a short bike ride, and Connecting Cave lets you go from Camphrier/Battle Chateau to Cyllage pretty quickly. If only the Couriway rail station had been functional, you could have traveled quickly from Lumiose to the three cities clustered in the east pretty fast too. Still, it's not a very pedestrian-friendly region all things considered.

Alola has very few settlements, and the biggest ones can all be reached with a ferry, so it's doing fine in this regard. The first couple of islands are also easy enough to circumnavigate on foot. However, only one shortcut really opens as the game progresses, the one that lets you reach Royal Avenue from Heahea City without passing through Paniola Town.

Unova's big circle is mostly easy to traverse (Twist Mountain and Chargestone Cave form a tedious barrier around Mistralton City, but it's the only really isolated town), but there is nothing to reduce the distances between cities, meaning you'll be biking for a while to get anywhere. The distance between Nimbasa and Opelucid is short as the crow flies, but you'll have to pass through six routes, three towns and two bridges to get from one to the other. True, there is no unavoidable grass between the two cities (as long as you have Cut for Route 13), but it's a very long way to go. To a lesser extent, this is also true for the areas you want to travel between in the late-game, like the Day Care, the PWT, Join Avenue and Battle Subway. Again, no unavoidable grass between them, but it's the same long trek every time.

As each individual route is well suited for overland travel (no unavoidable grass, hooray!), I may still opt for a bike when traversing Unova, but while doing so I keep pining for some shortcuts. If only the Battle Subway had a functional line!
Nice catch. I guess in writing that essay, I forgot about those little shortcuts. And with all the minor research I did for the post, forgetting something was inevitable (for examples, I glanced at the Bulbapedia pages for Ruins of Alph and names of Routes to confirm I was getting my facts right, and even made sure you could only get TM38 post-Galactic at Lake Verity).

You (and to an extent, others') long posts are actually what inspired me to make the essay in the first place (that, and I was bored, haha). Like that post you did on Bergmite on Page 22 of the "Worst Pokémon Ever (as of Generation 7)" thread (post #537) for example. Even though these are ultimately just video games at the end of the day, opinions are always nice to read even if they have depth to them.
 
I also find it weird how types like ice and dragon are still strictly only available in the late game. Pokemon like swinub and spheal are perfect for distribution in the early game, yet they are always available late game when you likely have a full team already. And if you don't, these ice types will be underleveled.

Not even Dragon, as Gen IV, VI and VII have had early-game Dragon-type Pokémon in Gible, Axew and the Bagon line. Granted that they are mostly only viable lategame, but it's still somewhat better than Ice.
 
Not even Dragon, as Gen IV, VI and VII have had early-game Dragon-type Pokémon in Gible, Axew and the Bagon line. Granted that they are mostly only viable lategame, but it's still somewhat better than Ice.
Nah, Earthquake from TM and Dragon Rage are enough for Gible and Gabite to work with until it gets to Garchomp.
Axew has Dragon Rage and Dual Chop by level and only needs a couple of levels to evolve anyway which isn't too terrible.
 
To be fair, Ice also has a couple early options, with Amaura technically before Axew in VI and both Delibird and Smoochum in VII.
 
To be fair, Ice also has a couple early options, with Amaura technically before Axew in VI and both Delibird and Smoochum in VII.
Amaura evolves at 39, Smoochum at 30, and Delibird only has Present and Drill Peck as level up moves, in addition to a paltry 330 BST. Only Smoochum comes close to being a viable choice for a spot in your team. Delibird is dead weight unless it is forced to use Present, when it becomes a liability. The only way it can be good if it is received as a foreign language trade with a full set of TM and Tutor moves.

The Dragon types do struggle to keep up with the rest of the team because of their late evos, but they get by with their defensive typing and offensive power, and once they evolve they basically promote to MVP. The Ice types are going to be struggling defensively forever, and having access to Ice STAB isn't really that much of a deal-breaker over having an Ice move for coverage on some other mon.
 
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Perfect for distribution in the early game (the stats of Swinub is just between those of Rattata and Pidgey) ...aside from horrendously late evolution. Spheal evolves at level 32, Swinub at level 33. Those Pokémon were assigned very high evolution levels to fit with their given role as late-game Pokémon, ensuring that their performance in the early-mid game would be pretty terrible. Imagine a Rattata that retained its poor stats until your starter reached its fully evolved form, and then still didn't evolve fully until twelve levels later. A slight tweaking of evolution levels would be necessary for these two to work as early-game Pokémon (like the Whismur family, which evolves at levels 20 and 40). Or rather, entirely new three-stage Ice-types could be created, with more sensible evolution levels, as Ice has half as many three-stage families as any other type except Ghost as it is now.
Good point, I didn't realize swinubs stats were that bad. Though, looking through the list of all ice types, there aren't many better options. Seriously, there are no ice types that evolve before level 30, except for some stone/item evolutions and glaceon. There are no suitable early ice types other than delibird and possibly sneasel, like, at all.

Personally, I want an early member of the rodent/bird/bug trio to be part ice. An ice starter or pseudo legend would be cool too. One shitty pokemon that can't even evolve until the literal end of the game and some pokemon that are essentially skins won't do.
 
What I find interesting about Ice types is that Gen 1 (And FireRed/Leafgreen by extension) actually have Ice-types in the mid-game. Granted, there’s only 4 Ice types total; Dewgong, Cloyster, Jynx, and Articuno. But they alone are more than sufficient, and they all appear around the mid-game; the former two when you acquire the Super Rod from Fuchsia, Jynx the moment Poliwag becomes obtainble (I believe via the Good Rod?) and Articuno can be found in the Seafoam Islands - if you want, you can head straight there as soon as you beat Koga.

It’s only in Generation 2 where this trend started, and I believe the idea was to demonstrate the power of Ice in the match-up versus dragons, as you have two very difficult matches ahead versus dragons, most notably the Champion, Lance. It’s pretty simple design in theory - present you with a cave full of a new type to capture before taking on its weakness. There’s just... so many problems with this in execution, however:

1. The Ice-types are too low-levelled to adequately take on Clair’s Pokemon, and thus there’s no incentive to use them regardless.

2. Kingdra isn’t even weak to Ice. What were they thinking?

3. The fact that all the Ice types were saved until now means there’s no real incentive to change up your current team. Why bother with an Ice type when you can just plow through with your other Pokemon already?

And then for whatever reason, the series decided that this should be a trend. Maybe it’s in the vein of evil teams to the developers - just a series staple that continues to persist. It doesn’t help that there’s often very difficult Dragon match-ups late-game - Drake for Gen III, Cynthia for Gen IV, N and Ghetsis for Gen 5 (though it should be noted Vanilluxe is available relatively early before the 4th gym), Drasma (okay this is pushing it) for Gen VI. And with Gen VII, the snowy mountain is the location of the Pokemon League - of course all the Ice types would be here, right? Though thankfully this was fixed in USUM.

Anyway, the point is that late Ice-types only began in Gen 2 from a series of understandable, but misled design choices, and then became a series trend and partially based off of Gen 2 ideas based on later match-ups.
 
What I find interesting about Ice types is that Gen 1 (And FireRed/Leafgreen by extension) actually have Ice-types in the mid-game. Granted, there’s only 4 Ice types total; Dewgong, Cloyster, Jynx, and Articuno. But they alone are more than sufficient, and they all appear around the mid-game; the former two when you acquire the Super Rod from Fuchsia, Jynx the moment Poliwag becomes obtainble (I believe via the Good Rod?) and Articuno can be found in the Seafoam Islands - if you want, you can head straight there as soon as you beat Koga.

It’s only in Generation 2 where this trend started, and I believe the idea was to demonstrate the power of Ice in the match-up versus dragons, as you have two very difficult matches ahead versus dragons, most notably the Champion, Lance. It’s pretty simple design in theory - present you with a cave full of a new type to capture before taking on its weakness. There’s just... so many problems with this in execution, however:

1. The Ice-types are too low-levelled to adequately take on Clair’s Pokemon, and thus there’s no incentive to use them regardless.

2. Kingdra isn’t even weak to Ice. What were they thinking?

3. The fact that all the Ice types were saved until now means there’s no real incentive to change up your current team. Why bother with an Ice type when you can just plow through with your other Pokemon already?

And then for whatever reason, the series decided that this should be a trend. Maybe it’s in the vein of evil teams to the developers - just a series staple that continues to persist. It doesn’t help that there’s often very difficult Dragon match-ups late-game - Drake for Gen III, Cynthia for Gen IV, N and Ghetsis for Gen 5 (though it should be noted Vanilluxe is available relatively early before the 4th gym), Drasma (okay this is pushing it) for Gen VI. And with Gen VII, the snowy mountain is the location of the Pokemon League - of course all the Ice types would be here, right? Though thankfully this was fixed in USUM.

Anyway, the point is that late Ice-types only began in Gen 2 from a series of understandable, but misled design choices, and then became a series trend and partially based off of Gen 2 ideas based on later match-ups.

Ice Punch can also be bought at the Celadon store, so if you needed Ice, you had it by the time you reached the Ice Path
 
Ice Punch can also be bought at the Celadon store, so if you needed Ice, you had it by the time you reached the Ice Path
You mean Goldenrod. And you could get Blizzard from the Game Corner if you somehow have stupid amounts of luck or money to burn, or Ice Beam if the guy sitting outside said Game Corner is available before taking on the League. (I can't recall at the moment)

Alternatively, Icy Wind from Pryce is at least something if you need Ice coverage, and slows the Pokemon hit with it. Or go catch Lapras the first Friday you can Surf.
 
I'd argue it's still usable though.
In a game where Exp share wasn't really usable and you received a level 15 when your entire team was well over level 35 I am unsure of this.

The hassle required to babysit it to usable level would basically outshine any utility it'd have, compared to just obtaining one of the others who are at your level and are usable right away.
 
In a game where Exp share wasn't really usable and you received a level 15 when your entire team was well over level 35 I am unsure of this.

The hassle required to babysit it to usable level would basically outshine any utility it'd have, compared to just obtaining one of the others who are at your level and are usable right away.
Mine was around 25 when i reached it actually (maybe I did something wrong. I was using a full team, so that might have done it)
 
Gamefreak, like any company, cares about what makes them the most money. Western audiences are larger, why wouldn't they care more about what they think?
There are a few reasons for this.

They (Japan's entertainment industries, mainly video games and anime) did this for a while for the same reasons you say. But they stopped because they think all westerners are media pirates. Whether that is true or not, that's the general belief in Japan.

There's also the reason that America doesn't care much about international sales, because you get a drastically lower profit margin after going through foreign distributors.
 
I don't know about this. Pokemon games releasing worldwide on the same day ever since X/Y seems to be strong evidence that they DO care about foreign markets to me.
 
In RBGY it was Level 15. This was improved in remakes -- Level 25 in FRLG and Level 34 in LGPE.
GSC/HGSS Lapras is lvl 20. You can get it any Friday after Surf, when your team should be roughly lvl 25. Still annoying, and definitely a Guide Dang It location, but that’s at least useable.
 
I don't know about this. Pokemon games releasing worldwide on the same day ever since X/Y seems to be strong evidence that they DO care about foreign markets to me.
No one's saying they don't care at all about the foreign market. It's just they care a heck of a lot more about their domestic market. (plus the games can be played in multiple languages regardless of where they were originally purchased since X/Y, so why not release them globally? It certainly makes Nintendo happy)
 
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