Girls have like 4 different pant types and guys get...ooone? Twoooo? depending on the game?
It's so half hearted
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(Little) Things that annoy you in Pokémon
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It's so half hearted
Well, guys don't like fashion, sooo (*rolls eyes so hard they pop out and roll away*)
I think this was a thing for at least most of the game in Go: your shorts were black, period. What you could change was the colour of the singular stripe on the outside of each leg. I own one pair of black shorts and it's because I needed clothes which could get ruined! I AM A MAIN CHARACTER; GIVE ME A BROAD COLOUR PALETTE TO CHOOSE FROM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Battle Royal matches were a really cool feature of the Alola games. Too bad the games don't really do anything with the feature. To highlight this, let's first review the other alternate battle formats that have been introduced over the generations, and see how they were incorporated into the singleplayer experience.
With that in mind, where does that leave battle royals? Well, they're one of the most innovative formats in the series, as it's the only format in the entire series that allows for conflict between more than two sides (those few horde and SOS encounters where the wild Pokemon attack their "allies" don't really count). And yet the format is only shown off a single time in the story, and it doesn't do anything besides reaffirm that Kukui is a goofy badass. I'm sure with a little effort, the plots of SM and USUM could have been tweaked to include a battle royal that actually does something. Like, maybe some of the villains in Rainbow Rocket start fighting internally, and you get roped into a free-for-all between them. Even triple and rotation battles, which didn't have any story moments, still remained somewhat relevant in gen 5 due to being repeated a good number of times by random trainers (rotation battles seem to have been largely forgotten though, probably because they're way less intuitive than triple battles). The battle royal format is only used in a single unnecessary story scene, so once that scene is over, people forget about the format. At best, someone will think about how silly Kukui's disguise as the Masked Royal was, and then remember "oh right, that was related to battle royals".
As a side note that wouldn't really fit anywhere on this site as its own post, Bulbapedia lists the anime-exclusive contest battles among the other formats touched upon in this post. They're like regular battles, but style points also matter. I think it would be really funny if a version of that actually happened on Showdown or at an in-person event. There would be a set of judges watching each match, and once the battle is over, they would determine who won. So even if the game says you lost the battle, the judges could still declare you the winner because you brought a heat set, or pulled off an excessively long string of double switches just to flex, or something else cool like that.
Double Battle
Introduced in Ruby and Sapphire, which had several designated trainer pairs, including a gym leader. Emerald expanded the mechanic by allowing separate trainers to gang up on you. Double battles would continue to be most common alternate format in singleplayer, as well as become incredibly popular in multiplayer, and is even the official format for real-world competition.
Multi Battle
A variation of double battles, introduced in Ruby and Sapphire, but not available in the main game until Emerald. Full multi battles are somewhat rare and usually reserved for climactic story moments, but partial multi battles happen every time you get challenged by two separate trainers.
Triple Battle
Introduced in Black and White (mostly White). Didn't do much originally due to being so rare, but the Black 2 and White 2 helped a bit by doubling the number of trainers who fought in this style, as well as not restricting almost every instance of it to a single game. It's a shame that there wasn't a story moment that makes use of triple battles (as far as I can tell, anyway) like how double and multi battles had Tate and Liza or the Steven teamup. It stings even more when you consider that the Unova games have a few trios already in place that could have led to interesting fights. Obviously there's the Striaton brothers and the Shadow Triad, but there also could have been a team up between Cheren, Bianca, and the player in some sort of triple-multi battle. While it did show up in gen 6, it was only ever in restaurants. Once gen 7 rolled around, the format was retired.
Rotation Battle
Introduced in Black and White (mostly Black). It's in basically the same situation as triple battles, except it was too weird to really lend itself to a good story moment, besides maybe a gym leader. Similar to its counterpart, it showed up in gen 6 restricted to restaurants or a single side trainer, and then it got dropped.
Horde Battle
Introduced in X and Y. The format showed up at several points in the game, but only ever as wild encounters, and never with any story significance. Still, they were a nice way to EV train. ORAS continued the wild use of hordes, but also include two story moments where you get attacked by a horde of grunts. Unfortunately, not much was done with these moments to fully make use of them being scripted and also trainer battles. Like, the grunts could have used Pokemon other than Poochyena and Mightyena, or they could have used more than one Pokemon each. Like the Unova duo, this format was also dropped in gen 7.
Sky Battle
Introduced in X and Y. This format sees a fair bit of use from sky trainers scattered across Kalos, though the format didn't see much story use, and it never got use after X and Y. I'm not too upset about that though, because it sounds like an OM designed by Little Timmy.
Inverse Battle
Introduced in X and Y. In both XY and ORAS, this format was exclusive to a single dude who had the power to flip the type chart on its head. It unfortunately has the same problem as rotation battles in that despite being cool, it's too weird to work into a story moment. Didn't make it past gen 6.
SOS Battle
Introduced in Sun and Moon. During gen 7, this format could happen in pretty much any wild encounter, and a modified version was used in the totem bosses. While it didn't return in gen 8, it got a ton of great use in Alola, so I can't complain.
Max Raid Battle
Introduced in Sword and Shield. The format is a popular side activity in the wild area, and a modified version of the format is used at the story's climax and during the postgame plot.
Introduced in Ruby and Sapphire, which had several designated trainer pairs, including a gym leader. Emerald expanded the mechanic by allowing separate trainers to gang up on you. Double battles would continue to be most common alternate format in singleplayer, as well as become incredibly popular in multiplayer, and is even the official format for real-world competition.
Multi Battle
A variation of double battles, introduced in Ruby and Sapphire, but not available in the main game until Emerald. Full multi battles are somewhat rare and usually reserved for climactic story moments, but partial multi battles happen every time you get challenged by two separate trainers.
Triple Battle
Introduced in Black and White (mostly White). Didn't do much originally due to being so rare, but the Black 2 and White 2 helped a bit by doubling the number of trainers who fought in this style, as well as not restricting almost every instance of it to a single game. It's a shame that there wasn't a story moment that makes use of triple battles (as far as I can tell, anyway) like how double and multi battles had Tate and Liza or the Steven teamup. It stings even more when you consider that the Unova games have a few trios already in place that could have led to interesting fights. Obviously there's the Striaton brothers and the Shadow Triad, but there also could have been a team up between Cheren, Bianca, and the player in some sort of triple-multi battle. While it did show up in gen 6, it was only ever in restaurants. Once gen 7 rolled around, the format was retired.
Rotation Battle
Introduced in Black and White (mostly Black). It's in basically the same situation as triple battles, except it was too weird to really lend itself to a good story moment, besides maybe a gym leader. Similar to its counterpart, it showed up in gen 6 restricted to restaurants or a single side trainer, and then it got dropped.
Horde Battle
Introduced in X and Y. The format showed up at several points in the game, but only ever as wild encounters, and never with any story significance. Still, they were a nice way to EV train. ORAS continued the wild use of hordes, but also include two story moments where you get attacked by a horde of grunts. Unfortunately, not much was done with these moments to fully make use of them being scripted and also trainer battles. Like, the grunts could have used Pokemon other than Poochyena and Mightyena, or they could have used more than one Pokemon each. Like the Unova duo, this format was also dropped in gen 7.
Sky Battle
Introduced in X and Y. This format sees a fair bit of use from sky trainers scattered across Kalos, though the format didn't see much story use, and it never got use after X and Y. I'm not too upset about that though, because it sounds like an OM designed by Little Timmy.
Inverse Battle
Introduced in X and Y. In both XY and ORAS, this format was exclusive to a single dude who had the power to flip the type chart on its head. It unfortunately has the same problem as rotation battles in that despite being cool, it's too weird to work into a story moment. Didn't make it past gen 6.
SOS Battle
Introduced in Sun and Moon. During gen 7, this format could happen in pretty much any wild encounter, and a modified version was used in the totem bosses. While it didn't return in gen 8, it got a ton of great use in Alola, so I can't complain.
Max Raid Battle
Introduced in Sword and Shield. The format is a popular side activity in the wild area, and a modified version of the format is used at the story's climax and during the postgame plot.
As a side note that wouldn't really fit anywhere on this site as its own post, Bulbapedia lists the anime-exclusive contest battles among the other formats touched upon in this post. They're like regular battles, but style points also matter. I think it would be really funny if a version of that actually happened on Showdown or at an in-person event. There would be a set of judges watching each match, and once the battle is over, they would determine who won. So even if the game says you lost the battle, the judges could still declare you the winner because you brought a heat set, or pulled off an excessively long string of double switches just to flex, or something else cool like that.
It didn't help that the battle royal format made the graphic lag horribly to the point you'd not want to play it.
To be fair, I still think one of the reasons triple and rotation were ditched in gen 7 was due to the fact that even just 2v2 battles often enough made the 3ds lag hard. It was pretty clear the hardware couldn't handle 4 pokemon + both trainers + whatever weather & terrain was going on (sometimes, even without any field condition going).
Battle Royal and Multibattle, which added two more trainers to the mix, made it *even worse*.
I don't even want to imagine how bad the system'd have performed with 6 pokemon on the field instead...
Now, one can definitely argue that it's GameFreak's fault for bad optimization and not the hardware's fault, but the suspect that the dismissal of those formats and replacement of Horde with SoS might have been induced by the fact the system couldn't handle them is there.
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I think it's a mixture of "the 3DS is a weaker system" and "Gamefreak's fault".
There are a ton of 3DS games that work with the system to put out some really solid performances. Pokemon is probably the highest profile blunder on that front and the sad thing is gen 7 is actually an improvement, it lags significantly less despite generally having more characters (& I'll point out that the trainer models tehmselves are not super low quality either) on screen at once for every battle and having far more going on in the battle backgrounds. And yet, that lag is still noticable.
No doubt the performance wasn't helped by their decision to have really high quality models (seriously volcanion has mroe polygons/tris going on than some HD games). But at the same time, you clearly had to keep iterating on this engine.
And then there's Sword "the entire world freezes when you climb a ladder" Shield and look I'm just saying maybe its just gamefreak is bad at this
There are a ton of 3DS games that work with the system to put out some really solid performances. Pokemon is probably the highest profile blunder on that front and the sad thing is gen 7 is actually an improvement, it lags significantly less despite generally having more characters (& I'll point out that the trainer models tehmselves are not super low quality either) on screen at once for every battle and having far more going on in the battle backgrounds. And yet, that lag is still noticable.
No doubt the performance wasn't helped by their decision to have really high quality models (seriously volcanion has mroe polygons/tris going on than some HD games). But at the same time, you clearly had to keep iterating on this engine.
And then there's Sword "the entire world freezes when you climb a ladder" Shield and look I'm just saying maybe its just gamefreak is bad at this
In fairness to that Iwata was basically a coding genius and gameboy games are kind of hard to work with in the best of times, this was mostly a cart space issue. And it was likely still a spacing issue even with Iwata's saving throw, considering how Kanto still had to miss out on things like Viridian Forest and msot of Mt Moon and so on. I'll give gamefreak a pass on that.
Also I think we have some new prototype builds that have Kanto in a sort of pre-final state where it had a few routes/cities merged with each other so it seems they either made some progress prior to IWata or they were able to work on what Iwata gave them to make sure everything fit there all snug.
To be fair, you could do free battles online with the battle royals format.
That was a really long time ago, though. Game development back when they were a small studio with one surprising hit game under their belt can hardly be compared to game development when they had been a successful studio pumping out mega-hit games annually for two decades.
What can be compared, however, is their handling of the situation. They really ought to have learned a few lessons - if not from their own experience, then certainly from other studios around the industry - about biting over more than they could chew. About having ambitions they can't pull off, and what to do when it turns out they're missing the know-how in-house to pull it off. Asking the in-house team to just kludge together something that resembles what they want to do is hardly a winning strategy in the long run. Having to sacrifice a couple of battle formats in Gen VII for the sake of performance ought to have got a few executives to ask "maybe we should hire a few guys to get better at optimization?". Sword and Shield kinda suggests that question wasn't met with more than a shrug.
Well the games have something like that:
First we have the Battle Institute that gives you a score depending on how you did in their test battle. Among some of the things given points for they award points for super effective moves used & moves your Pokemon resisted or were immune to. However it also goes the opposite where you lose points if hit with a SE move or the opponent resists/was immune to your Pokemon's move.
Then there was the Battle Arena where after three turns into a round, if you nor your opponent knocked the other out, the battle was stopped and each Pokemon was judged on Mind (how many attacking moves were used), Skill (how accurate & effective the moves were), and Body (how much HP your Pokemon had left).
So here's the big question: should they be brought back now that Pokemon has moved to the main consoles which can handle the additional models in battle? Like the only time I really notice SwSw getting laggy is when you turn on Wifi in the Wild Area and there's now a few dozen player avatars running, biking, or setting up camps.
I think that's more just so something doesn't get you into a battle while you're in the middle of climbing up/down.
To try and have an earnest look at this that isnt just calling gamefreak incompetent & calling it a day, to give them a fair shake: They probably did hire people to "get beter at optimization" (which let's get real it is never that simple nor that easy) among other things; they had like 4 times as many people on SWSH than they did on Gen 7 ( you will note once those numbers started going around the "gamefreak is just a small developer, cut them some slack!" posts stopped entirely)
If I had to guess there was just capital-p Problems during development for an HD platform. And that was probably compounded by their dev time likely being the same as they always had: about 4-ish years depending on the exact time they start wrapping up work on the prior game. They rpobably really did need another year, minimum, just so they can have more experience with developing for the system and likely onboarding their now-huge staff.
that said
Even if this was the case* there is 0 excuse for literally everything stopping mid animation. It is seriously the entire world stopping while you're on the ladder. Pokeballs will be flung by trainer idles and they'll be stopped mid-air!
*Reasons why I don't think this is the case:
-getting into a battle does not change your state, if a pokemon ran into you on the ladder it should be all counts just return you to the ladder
-if they really did not want you in a battle on a ladder, then they should just set it to ignore the battle parameters. Just stay on that ladder as a bisharp just runs directly into you.
-just have near by pokemon despawn if they approach the ladder
I try hard to look at this from a developer side of things and know that games are complex and hard and there's time constraints and constatn fires to put out (why is the wild area so trashy to look at? Because it likely had performance issues. Why is the back half of the game so rushed? Because it likely had time constraints and they couldn't put as much focus into the events. ) but this one above all blows my mind
So this is something that does not really "annoy" me but left me quite puzzled.
I was checking out some character options for a Nintendo Switch user avatar... and there are no Pokémon options.
You'd think that with Pokémon being one of Nintendo's exclusive heavyweights they would have released some character options, at the very least when Sword and Shield were released, but nope. No player characters, no starters, no cover legendaries, no Leon and Charizard(DID YOU KNOW THEY ARE UNDEFEATED!!!???). Nothing.
At first I thought "Well, maybe they only add avatars for games that are developed within Nintendo itself"... but Kirby has options, so that theory holds no weight.
I was checking out some character options for a Nintendo Switch user avatar... and there are no Pokémon options.
You'd think that with Pokémon being one of Nintendo's exclusive heavyweights they would have released some character options, at the very least when Sword and Shield were released, but nope. No player characters, no starters, no cover legendaries, no Leon and Charizard
At first I thought "Well, maybe they only add avatars for games that are developed within Nintendo itself"... but Kirby has options, so that theory holds no weight.
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I'm not a fan of the names chosen for Galar's regional evolutions. Most of them are just puns on the original Pokemon's name. I don't mean they were puns that use the same inspiration as the original names. That happens all the time. No, I mean they literally use the original Pokemon's name as inspiration for the pun, usually without any regard for why the original name worked. Let's go down the list, shall we?
Perrserker
This one isn't actually that bad. It might be a combination of "Persian" and "berserker", but the double R actually makes me think it's mostly a play on "purr".
Sirfetch'd
It's "Farfetch'd" + "sir". Could have been something like Chivalro's that kept in the style of Farfetch'd where it's an adjective with a weird apostrophe, but no. It's Sir Farfetch'd.
Mr. Rime
Mr. Mime + rime. They didn't even keep the established through line of the family's names. The only thing that could save this name is if Game Freak intentionally avoided using "Mime" so it would make sense that Mime Jr. isn't called Mime III. If that was actually their reasoning, then I love this name, but if not, fuck off.
Cursola
Corsola + curse. Not only is it way too similar to Corsola phonetically, making it hard to differentiate them when spoken, but it no longer has any reference to coral.
Obstagoon
This one gets a pass, as it's just following the family's naming convention (unlike Mr. Rime). I just wish Linoone didn't have an E at the end.
EDIT: Actually, Obstagoon does do something wrong. It should have been named Obstacoon. Zigzagoon has the G from zigzag, and Linoone has the N from line. Obstagoon should have the C from obstacle.
Runerigus
Fuck this name. Fuck everything about this name. It's obviously a combination of Cofagrigus and rune, but when I said these names disregarded what made the originals work, this was the name I primarily had in mind.
Cofagrigus is a combination of sarcophagus and egregious (the spellings might also take some inspiration from coffin, but those other two are doing most of the work). Sarcophagus and egregious phonetically fit together really nicely. To demonstrate, I'm going to color code which parts of Cofagrigus come from sarcophagus and which parts come from egregious.
SARCOPHAGUS
EGREGIOUS
COFAGRIGUS
Almost all of both source words are used, and half the name draws from both words simultaneously, making the transitions between the phonetic inspirations seamless. Now let's do the same for Runerigus. It doesn't matter if we draw from Cofagrigus or egregious. The name is garbage either way.
RUNE
EGREGIOUS
COFAGRIGUS
RUNERIGUS
Sure, the name technically still uses all but one syllable, but that's a lot less impressive when A) one of the words is only a single syllable, and B) the cut syllable was attached to an R. While a hard C puts a clear barrier between the preceding and proceeding syllables, R is notorious for slurring sounds together, so while sar-cophagus is a clean cut, eg-regious is quite messy. Even after all of that, Runerigus still has another huge problem. While the E technically comes from rune, it's originally silent, so when you actually say "Runerigus", there's an E sound that comes out of nowhere and puts a huge wedge in between the inspirations. Even if you pronounce it "roon-ree-jus" (which I will be doing from now on, as it sounds much better) there still isn't any overlap like there was with Cofagrigus. The inspirations are just sitting next to each other without anything to actually tie them together.
Shout out to my mom for being a first grade teacher. I doubt I would have still known about R's notoriety if I hadn't been regularly hearing her describe her lessons and helping her organize her classrom (which has a word sound chart prominently displayed) for years.
Perrserker
This one isn't actually that bad. It might be a combination of "Persian" and "berserker", but the double R actually makes me think it's mostly a play on "purr".
Sirfetch'd
It's "Farfetch'd" + "sir". Could have been something like Chivalro's that kept in the style of Farfetch'd where it's an adjective with a weird apostrophe, but no. It's Sir Farfetch'd.
Mr. Rime
Mr. Mime + rime. They didn't even keep the established through line of the family's names. The only thing that could save this name is if Game Freak intentionally avoided using "Mime" so it would make sense that Mime Jr. isn't called Mime III. If that was actually their reasoning, then I love this name, but if not, fuck off.
Cursola
Corsola + curse. Not only is it way too similar to Corsola phonetically, making it hard to differentiate them when spoken, but it no longer has any reference to coral.
Obstagoon
This one gets a pass, as it's just following the family's naming convention (unlike Mr. Rime). I just wish Linoone didn't have an E at the end.
EDIT: Actually, Obstagoon does do something wrong. It should have been named Obstacoon. Zigzagoon has the G from zigzag, and Linoone has the N from line. Obstagoon should have the C from obstacle.
Runerigus
Fuck this name. Fuck everything about this name. It's obviously a combination of Cofagrigus and rune, but when I said these names disregarded what made the originals work, this was the name I primarily had in mind.
Cofagrigus is a combination of sarcophagus and egregious (the spellings might also take some inspiration from coffin, but those other two are doing most of the work). Sarcophagus and egregious phonetically fit together really nicely. To demonstrate, I'm going to color code which parts of Cofagrigus come from sarcophagus and which parts come from egregious.
SARCOPHAGUS
EGREGIOUS
COFAGRIGUS
Almost all of both source words are used, and half the name draws from both words simultaneously, making the transitions between the phonetic inspirations seamless. Now let's do the same for Runerigus. It doesn't matter if we draw from Cofagrigus or egregious. The name is garbage either way.
RUNE
EGREGIOUS
COFAGRIGUS
RUNERIGUS
Sure, the name technically still uses all but one syllable, but that's a lot less impressive when A) one of the words is only a single syllable, and B) the cut syllable was attached to an R. While a hard C puts a clear barrier between the preceding and proceeding syllables, R is notorious for slurring sounds together, so while sar-cophagus is a clean cut, eg-regious is quite messy. Even after all of that, Runerigus still has another huge problem. While the E technically comes from rune, it's originally silent, so when you actually say "Runerigus", there's an E sound that comes out of nowhere and puts a huge wedge in between the inspirations. Even if you pronounce it "roon-ree-jus" (which I will be doing from now on, as it sounds much better) there still isn't any overlap like there was with Cofagrigus. The inspirations are just sitting next to each other without anything to actually tie them together.
Shout out to my mom for being a first grade teacher. I doubt I would have still known about R's notoriety if I hadn't been regularly hearing her describe her lessons and helping her organize her classrom (which has a word sound chart prominently displayed) for years.
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It might be because TPC and GF are extremely protective on Pokémon brand name. In GF’s case, we were discussing on Discord why GF doesn’t like partaking in crossovers and letting other companies to involved in Pokémon games might be because they fear that if they lose Pokémon, the company is dead especially since Little Town Hero failed. ( To put how bad that game was, it’s the first and only game to recieve a hate rating from GamExplain. It recieved criticism that we constantly give Pokémon games, too many reused animations, too many lags, and very little content to name a few problems. )
I’m more surprised that we haven’t had themes on the Switch like the 3DS yet. I’m wonder if they are in planning.
We have actually seen a tiny bit of Arbok's varying patterns. Arboks in Johto and Hoenn originally had a slightly difference design, though both were undone in their remakes.
They at least temporarily tried with Arbok. The same can't be said for Mantyke.
The thing is Game Freak has been around longer than Pokémon (not a huge company, but still), and they made a few other games even during the Pokémon era (mainly Drill Dozer and Harmoknight, and I believe those games are decent?)
I think Game Freak as a company would exist without Pokémon, but it would have to glose most of its employees.
Pokémon's success combined with the faults of the recent games reinforce to me that Game Freak is really good at coming up with gameplay concepts and character design, but struggles with almost everything else. Graphics, engine optimization, storytelling, marketing (though this might be a Nintendo issue, too); they're all areas where they clearly have major faults and it's creating a lot of backlash.
All of this isnt helped by TPCi's insistence on getting a game out every year (at least that's my understanding of what's going on?). I don't think Sword and Shield would have a massively improved story or adequate graphics for the system, even with additional development time, but they could have optimized the code for the engine or gave Galar a little more content, making the games feel, if nothing else, a little more complete. I guess that's what the DLC is for, but I also just don't really like buying a game with the expectation that I have to buy more content for it later.
While there's really no source I can find confirming this, it's at least widely believed the relation between GameFreak and Nintendo is a strained one. Both probably see each other hard to work with, Nintendo being more corporate while GF being more casual. I can see the GF execs dreading having to meet with the Nintendo execs because they know they're going to have to come up with deadlines when all they want to do is make GAAAAAMEs. Meanwhile Nintendo execs massage the bridge of their nose hoping the thoughts of just strangling the GF execs and taking the Pokemon franchise via bloody conquest doesn't cross their mind as they try to extract the vaguest of timelines like a dentist does with cavities.
If true it's understandable then why we don't really see much Pokemon stuff in other Nintendo products which allows other Nintendo franchises to be referenced. The biggest examples I can think of is (1) the Pokemon characters in Mario Maker do not come with Pokemon sound effects while all other characters, even ones from third parties, do have sound effects from their games and (2) while Animal Crossing causally has items referencing other Nintendo franchises the only time they've had officially Pokemon-based items was for a special event advertising Let's Go Pikachu & Eevee (where Pikachu and Eevee were the only Pokemon to have items based on them). Of course what isn't clearly known is if Nintendo does this out of spite or if they have to get approval from GF to use the Pokemon characters (which would be the only legal reasons I could see why they wouldn't do it).
Hmm, me thinks we should check the Japanese names.
Meowth to Perrserker: Nyarth to Nyaiking:
(Additional Note: Persian is the same in both language)
So, Nyarth comes from "nya" which is the Japanese onomatopoeia of "meow" and then them reversing the way Siam is pronounced in Japanese (it has to do with the katakana, just trust me on this as pronouncing it in English doesn't make it clear) and using the last katakana from doing that (this all so they could reference the Siamese cat).
Nyaiking is "nya" combined with "viking".
So that's what the translators had to work with. And probably finding that "meow" doesn't really fit into "viking" as well as "nya" did, went to do something different. They chose another cat-related onomatopoeia, "purr", and instead of viking went with the names given to viking warriors, "berserker". And since they went with "purr" I fully believe them changing the "u" to an "e" is likely a reference to Persian as both it and Perrserker are Meowth evolutions.
Farfetch'd to Sirfetch'd: Kamonegi to Negigaknight:
Kamonegi is a combination of "kamo" (wild duck), "negi" (bunching onions) and the phrase "kamonegi" which is an abbreviation of a Japanese saying meaning "a duck comes bearing bunching onions". Once again, a lot of katakana at work here but it makes sense.
Negigaknight comes from "negi" (bunching onions), the prefix giga-, and knight. What's the relation? Another Japanese pun: "negi ga nai to" (must have a bunching onion).
So you can probably see the problem here. The Japanese words relating the evolutions is "onion" which was omitted from the English name, the English name more focused on the meaning of the phrase that Farfetch'd is based on (curious why that is, but that's not the point at the moment). So, the translators probably just threw their hands in the air with this one and focused on the important change: it's now a knight, knights were called "sir", call it Sirfetch'd by replacing the "fa" before the "r" with "si".
Mr. Mime to Mr. Rime: Barrierd to Barrikohru:
Barrierd is a combination of the English word "barrier" and possibly "weird" or "barricade".
Barrikohru is a combination of "barrier" and the Japanese "koru" (to freeze).
Once again, Gen I translator shenanigans causing problems or future translators to work around. Since they just had to add that "Mr." honorific and kept the theme with its prevo by calling it "Mime Jr." (note Mime Jr.'s Japanese name doesn't really have anything to do with this) means it's the "Mr." part that makes the most sense keeping, especially when "Rime" (frost covering on cold objects) rhymes with "Mime" and they have to reference it being Ice-type now. Plus, Galarian Mr. Mime and Mr. Rime are no longer mimes but vaudevillian tap dancers.
Corsola to Cursola: Sunnygo to Sunigoon:
Sunnygo is a combination of the English word "sunny" and Japanese "sango" (coral).
Sunigoon is the same... except with the addition "on" it sounds like the English word "gone" and also maybe from "Gorgon" (Greek mythical creature with the snake hairs; Medusa is a name of a well known Gorgon).
So the translators, to stay as close to the Japanese name which is the goal here whether you like it or not, had to keep the name the same (that its "sunny coral"; or "coral solar" going by the English name) but to reference its now doomed fate as dead coral. I would actually say "Cursola" is probably the best they could do, though if up to me I would have done "Corsolong".
Linoone to Obstagoon: Massuguma to Tachifusaguma:
Massuguma is a combination of "massugu" (straight line) and either araiguma (racoon) or anaguma (badger); "guma"/"kuma" is a common suffix for mammals that the Japanese consider bear-resembling.
Tachifusaguma is a combination of tachifusagu (to obstruct) and the above animal Japanese names.
Pretty straight forward (haha) with keeping inline with the Japanese name (plus an added "goon" reference to describe Obstagoon's bipedal appearance).
And though it doesn't have to do with your problem with the name, here's a bonus:
Yamask to Runerigus: Desumasu to Deathbarn:
(Additional Note: Cofagrigus's Japanese name is Desukarn)
Desumasu is transliteration of "death mask".
Desukarn is transliteration of "death" and Japanese "kan" (coffin).
Deathbarn is English "death" and Japanese "ban" (slab).
Once again, straightforward and had nothing to do with your issue of the name. Personally I think if they had kept the "g" between the "e" and "r" to make Runegrigus it would have sounded better. However, considering the problem they had with Cof*grigus name and my suggestion of Runegrigus is one letter away from having a derogatory slang term in the exact same spot I think they wanted to ignore that.
For the room they just don't want to program in the extra detail especially if no one else besides us is going to see it. If they ever have some kind of room customizer it would be for a secret base feature which allows us to share it with other players.
What do you mean by nickname colors?
Here's GF's Wikipedia and Bulbapedia page detailing history and other game they released.
While the other games they've released have been fine, yeah, I don't think they would survive as a company without Pokemon, even if they chopped most of its employees (they'd essentially have to go indie with just the execs left and maybe a few programmers). It's both their blessing and their curse.
Who knows at this point. All that is known GF is pushing out Pokemon games yearly now (or Expansions atm). No one knows who's giving the order to do this or if anyone can give the order to not do this (and if they do why haven't they when many people are agreeing the quality is beginning to suffer... it's greed, isn' it?).
Some say it's the Pokemon Company forcing this which would make sense as they're the pure marketing behind the Pokemon franchise and would have to make sure the merch is ready to sell alongside the games. However at the same time shouldn't they have an invested interest to make sure the games are good quality, because if no one likes the games they may not want to buy the merch. Also game development can be tricky and if a problem occurs resulting in a major delay that would put their schedule also out of whack.
Some say it's GameFreak themselves trying to push themselves to stay relevant in a changing world where kids are now paying attention to mobile games... at least according to them. This is what I more believe in, the GF execs have STRANGE ideas which may make for interesting games but not good business practices.
Some say it's Nintendo who don't really care about Pokemon and just want their share of the pie. This is stupid cause Pokemon makes stupid amounts of money, probably more than Mario and Zelda (individually, I think combined they'd outsale Pokemon merch... maybe), so would just be as equally stupid for Nintendo to do a quick money scheme by sponging out the Pokemon franchise.
Honestly, it's probably a combination of the three. Both Pokemon Company and Nintendo would want the next games out asap and ask GF if that's possible. GF, not wanting to look obsolete, says of course it is so they make the deadlines which puts GF in a crunch they can't really get out of (both contractually and mentally). Now I think if GF says they need more development time then Pokemon Company and Nintendo would give them more development time, there's plenty of merch ideas the Pokemon Company can come up with in the meantime and as long as Nintendo is getting a slice of that they won't be breathing too much down GF's throat as long as they keep to the longer development deadline.
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I don't follow. I appreciate the rime-mime pun, and I probably wouldn't have any problems with this evolution if it was just the two of them, but Mime Jr. throws all that out the window. By going from Mime Jr. to Mr. Mime, it's established that the common thread in this family's names, at least in English, is "mime". I don't see how you could determine that "it's the 'Mr.' part that makes the most sense keeping".
I most certainly do not.I'm sorry for being about to go off on a mostly-non-Pokemon-related rant, but this is a hot button issue for me. It's an issue I see most often in relation to anime, and it's weird that I'm passionate on this issue considering I haven't regularly watched or even really cared about... any TV show for years, but that's beside the point. Anyway, to at least somewhat tie this back to Pokemon, a common example I see of this problem in action is when people criticize 4Kids for their localization changes to the original Pokemon anime, usually Brock's jelly donuts (which I'll admit is weird and poorly executed) or the sub sandwich rolling down the hill. These people cry censorship, and claim that the localizers think kids are too stupid to comprehend other cultures, or even that localizers are maliciously trying to prevent kids from learning about other cultures. And all I can think when I hear this is... what the fuck?
People who think like this are missing the forest for the trees. When Japanese kids watched an onigiri roll down a hill, or listened to Brock say how much he loves rice balls, they weren't having a profound learning experience about a foreign culture. No, they were seeing foods that they instantly recognized and were familiar with. People can be so concerned about making sure every little detail is preserved that they fail to preserve the actual experience. Nothing is experienced devoid of context, so if you truly want to present something in a new context while preserving the original experience, you're going to have to make changes to the thing itself. Because the original experience did not involve unfamiliar foods, more sexuality than is deemed appropriate, or reading dialogue while characters make sounds you don't understand.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk on why translation purists are dumb idiots.
i mean, the logical route for a mr. mime evo would be "mime sr.", but they had to differentiate the now ice-type galarian version somehow.
also, there is precedent to this sort of evolution name change - consider horSEA-SEADRA-kingDRA
Honestly, back during the waiting time before release, I was hoping they would.
Sadly they didn't (for same reason they ditched most postgame content, too little playerbase to make it worth :( ) but heh
Wasnt there a issue (I read it somewhere on this boards back when talking about Dexit) with GameFreaks being extremely jealous of their IP and refusing to accept ANY crossreference, with their presence in Smash being a miracle as it is?
I see people spout this all the time as some sort of fact which has always really confused me sense it doesn't make much sense when you break it down. The Pokemon Company was created and jointly owned by Creatures, Gamefreak and Nintendo (we know from Nintendo's annual reports that they own 32% so the other two are likely around the same) with the intent of licensing the franchise to things other than games (anime, toys, clothes, etc.). How in the world would a company under three different people's controls have the power to completely dictate Gamefreak's production team?
Even assuming they did, how would that benefit them? I often see people say that the anime has to have a new region/Pokemon every three years but the Orange Islands already shows that they can handle delays well (Gold and Silver was supposed to come out Holiday 1997 originally). Diamond and Pearl was announced in 2004 and scheduled for a 2005 release but delayed by about a year. Black and White also had a four year gap from Diamond and Pearl and Gold/Silver eventually came out after close to four years (Feb 1996-Nov 1999). Not to mention that the anime doesn't really benefit from third slightly updated versions and that even if they don't have a new game, they can just shine a spotlight on some lesser known old Pokemon and increase the sales for their merchandise.
Nintendo being the culprit is even less likely and not just because they don't treat their own IPs this way. The Nintendo 64 was a bit of a failure, only selling slightly over 30 million units compared to PS1's 100 million plus (it even lost to the Sega Saturn in Japan) and the Gamecube was a pretty big failure, losing not only dramatically to the PS2 (155 mil vs 21 mil) but even the newfangled Xbox (24 mil). After that their entire existence was being bet on the Wii, which while a great success also flew in the face of everyone's expectations and was by no means a certain success. While I'm sure they were feeling pretty safe when developing the Wii U, it was pretty clearly failing from mid-2013 onward and once again you could say their existence as a hardware developer was basically hinging on the Switch, another unproven gamble that flew in the face of expectations. My point in this hardware history is that if Nintendo was the one calling the shots at Gamefreak, don't you think they would actually call the shots to their advantage? There was a basically a point for every single console they have developed sense Pokemon became a thing where they needed an ace in the hole, and a console Pokemon RPG would have been a huge boost to them, yet it never happened. I'm pretty sure if they could make it happen, they would have, as opposed to you know closing down shop and publishing Super Mario on Sony platforms. Even in regards to handheld hardware, Pokemon hasn't really helped push weight in that regard often coming out on the console after it was already a success. Iwata asked Sakurai to develop a launch game for the Nintendo 3DS after Smash Bros. Brawl shipped (January 2008) meaning they already had a lot of the hardware down and were ready to let people develop games for it. Despite that Pokemon Black and White came out on the DS in late 2010 and their sequels came out on the DS in mid-2012, over a year after the 3DS released. You have to be doing some real mental gymnastics to describe this as Nintendo's will.
I think a lot of people think Gamefreak and Nintendo are closer than they actually are, from what I can tell Nintendo merely helped fund the original Pokemon games and in exchange owns a slice of the brand which is why Pokemon games are exclusive to them and beyond that Gamefreak is their own company. This is why they can do things like rip-off Donkey Kong Country (Tembo) and release it on every platform besides the 3DS/Wii-U/Switch (not to mention published by Sega not TPC). Even if you assume Nintendo has at least decent pull over the actual games themselves, why are they going to go out on a limb and risk damaging a relationship when the games are selling well?
I think people are just incapable of understanding that companies are, well, companies with the intent of making money. They want to make something you like yes but they also want to maximize their profit while doing so. Some companies may be more scummy than others but it's usually just because they are poor at judging the balancing act of "how far can I cut corners before it bites me in the ass?". I like Nintendo, they're basically the only game company in the world who's existed sense the 80s that hasn't completely fallen off and disgraced all their franchises at some point, but it's not because they're saints (see Mario Kart Tour) it's probably mostly because as a company that provides both hardware and software they have to be more forward thinking and play the long game, where companies like E.A./Activision will gladly exploit something like Guitar Hero/Rock Band until they can't anymore than throw it away for the next trend. Gamefreak is made up of talented people who have done amazing things and business men who want to cut as many corners as possible, and they aren't even necessarily different people. The world is complicated that way.
Also Gamefreak would not remotely exist if they didn't have Pokemon. None of their non-Pokemon games have any sales info (which isn't really a great sign considering places like Famitsu publish top sellers every week, and the definition of top is pretty low) but let's ignore critical reaction. Pulseman is infamously rare all over the world going for over $200 even in places like Japan where used games are usually really cheap, so it probably sold horribly. Drill Dozer fared a bit better with a whopping nine reviews on Amazon Japan and is available for around $15 (which is slightly expensive for a used GBA game and means it has less reviews than Metroid...in Japan) and 33 reviews on US Amazon (using Metroid Fusion again it has 240). Not the most accurate measurement but doesn't really paint a good picture. As for the recent digital games it's hard to say but considering most Gamefreak fans don't even know these games exist I doubt they lit the world on a fire. It's unlikely the company could have kept on existing with that and if they did it would be on a skeleton staff.
I would not be surprised in the slightest if they realised the naming problem and deliberately made a new species for Galarian Yamask's evolution (instead of making a Galarian Co***rigus) to avoid controversy, and they just kept that idea going with Perrserker instead of a Galarian Persian.
I'll just say I'm happy to finally see someone who understood what I've been trying to point in last almost-entire-year :P
We actually do have sales info about their latest iteration (Little Town Hero, which actually was published on consoles other than just Switch even) and... they're not good. In fact, even the critic / votes are pretty mediocre at best.
The fact that GameFreaks is literally being carried by the Pokemon IP isn't exactly a meme, unfortunately. And the reason for which I often call the Winner's Curse about them, where they don't even realize that the only reason they manage to keep going is because they (partially) own a super famous brand, and not because their games are good.
(Unpopular: it's not that Pokemon games aren't good or fun, I think for their intended playerbase they're okay, just in isolation, compared to other games released in same timeframe, they're always worse, way worse)
Stadium had a neat formula to change a Pokemon's hue based on the Original Trainer ID, and Poke nickname
You can get neat things like Red Koffing, Amber Bulbasaur, or Blue tailed Smeargle.
The CPU in cups and Round 2 show this off
*This is not to be mistakened for shiny, as that overrides Nickname colors