I don't have any problems with rivals having the starter that is weak against yours, but I think this concept is better when there's another rival that uses the remaining one, so that you get to see all three starters in a single playthrough. What Black & White and X & Y did, pretty much (even though XY was weird about showing all of the starters' forms).
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
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So both are garbage trainers and garbage rivals.
Yes, Hau learns to teambuild, good for him. But the first battle is the most important. It's for bragging rights until you meet again.
And both of them are annoying af. I'd rather have someone like Serena/Calem with no character than someone like Hau/Hop to get in the way of everything. Hau is just slightly less annoying than the Rotom Dex. They're better suited to be relegated to the likes of Tierno and Trevor rather than a "rival".
I actually felt so bad for Hop after beating him in the tournament. He gets a new theme, talks about how serious he's gonna be, tries to build the best team he can (except for dubwool and pincurchin, at least bring another electric type !)... and then you just slamdunk his team, his hopes and his dreams like you always do.
And then everyone congratulates you for beating him and reaching the finals WHEN HE'S RIGHT THERE. Like come on, at least respect him a little...
At least they both get a happy ending, Hau becoming the next kahuna by fighting an ultra beast alongside Koko, and Hop deciding to become a pokemon professor (and getting a fricking legendary in his team, one of the best even if you play shield).
First battle is the most important? i'd say its the least important, its a "spam A and see what happens" fest in most games, and "idk oneshot with the super effective move" in others. theres nothing interessing about those battles, even the game knows because it lets you progress after you lose to the first rival battle in most games, and the ones that dont are just annoying if you end up losing
I used Maractus it in my White playthrough. Needed a Grass-type, encountered it in Desert Resort and thought "eh, a cactus would do", and it served me pretty well. Can't remember whether I had it with me for the entire journey, I do think I remembered it getting often outsped so had it doing Giga Drain most of the time to keep healing itself, it was certainly a niche but it served me well I recall.
Some people may bad mouth Maractus, but I'll give it priase *picks up Maractus and gives it a hug* OUCH! OUCH! OUCH! WHY DID I THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?!
*Maractus happily dances*
To be fair that has nothing with it being a good Pokemon in-game.To be fair Furret even has a dedicated global twitch emote. It's illegal for it to not be in the games
"Tell me about it"
While funny, still feel like I should note for those who don't know that, to go with the "GO" connection, the default name of the player characters & the new Rival name had to do with movement: Boy is "Chase", Girl is "Elaine" (from "lane"), and Rival is "Trace" (one of its definition being "find or discover by investigation"). This also goes for their Japanese names: Kakeru ("to dash"), Ayumi ("step" or "progress"), & Shin ("advance").
Though until Gen VI the Starters didn't have an elemental move until Level 7. Of course this change is why the Rival has the Type disadvantage. Though maybe they should make the first battle with the Rival have them not using the Starter and then after the battle they get the Starter, but you wait a bit before the second battle giving you time to catch some other Pokemon.
It gets worse. If you pick Scorbunny, Hop picks the starter that is weak to you AND Leon's.
Then he starts talking copious amounts of trash while getting bodied and is shocked when Bede wipes the floor with him.
And animations.
I dunno, I'd give more credit to the player for actually overcoming the type disadvantage.
Gen 6 actually did it better though, because on XY the weaker rival is the Furfrou chick the game low key ships with male players (lol at where you get the Protect TM.) while Serena/Calem actually get the advantage and are painted as better trainers (and fall flat when you finally get to battle them and they straight up admit they're not gonna be able to beat you.) and on ORAS they remove the STAB from the rival's starter because you can't catch mons yet.
Hau and Hop is where things get blatantly silly, and there's really no reason for it on Hop's case because the starter only gets STAB on Lv. 6.
Straight up dumbed down design. Masuda must think kids today ain't as good as 90's kids. Pokémon been disrespecting these kids for almost a decade now.
Considering what we've seen going in the Dynamax Adventures thread, and mixed with my own personal experiences, I am still convinced that they aren't actually wrong on this.Straight up dumbed down design. Masuda must think kids today ain't as good as 90's kids. Pokémon been disrespecting these kids for almost a decade now.
Todays kids *are* dumb and lazy. (not all, but on average yes)
Somewhat releated, I'd also point that in Japan specifically there's a relatively common trend of buying games just for the story/lore/graphics and only wanting to completely breeze through the story, which is why so many JP games have p2w dlcs that for a couple bucks will give a overpowered weapon/armor/charachter/something or extremely easy game modes that literally offer no challenge at all and can be beaten in autopilot.
Hell in Persona games's easy mode you literally *cant die*, if you do you're healed back to full HP.
....incidentally, Let's Go had a pretty much P2W Mew......
Diophantine
Banned deucer.
On average, kids aren't more dumb these days - if anything they're smarter than they were 10 years ago, and this increases over the generations incrementally as kids are exposed to more complex things year by year in addition to more convenient internet access. The difference now is that Pokemon has to contend with the video games of the late 2010-2020s, like the mobile phone games and games such as Fortnite, games which you don't need to grind for and can just pick up and play. There are also alternatives to playing games these days such as watching other people play games on Youtube, watching things on Netflix, etc etc. Because of this, (at least this is my conclusion) kids now cba to grind in games because grinding can be a little boring, and so Pokemon has to adapt to all of this by making the game easier and giving away more "freebies" like the Mega Lucario and all the other gifts in XY so they don't hit the attention span limit of today's kids. I see this in my younger sisters (11 and 13) who do like playing the Pokemon games (the old ones I passed down to them) but spend most of their free time watching anime/tv series/playing among us or whatever popular mobile game is in at the current moment.
Edgy jerk rivals are not necessary at all, and Barry is the best rival. Rivals need to a) provide a challenge as difficult or more difficult than gym leaders and b) be integrated in the game's plot. The reason I'm not too big of a fan of Blue as a rival (but I am of him as a gym leader) is because he only really fits one of those two criteria. All he is is an obstacle to get over. Why is he even challenging you at Silph Co. lol? Granted, he is the first rival, to be fair, so it's a bit extreme to expect something other than basic. Silver only fits one of those criteria, namely the second one. Great story and everything but his battles are all too easy. Brenden/May fit both until you get to a certain point, and then end up fitting neither, unless you play ORAS where they at least retain the second criteria throughout. Barry fits both perfectly, which is why I believe he's the best rival. I don't really remember much past gen 4, however.
Edgy jerk rivals are not necessary at all, and Barry is the best rival. Rivals need to a) provide a challenge as difficult or more difficult than gym leaders and b) be integrated in the game's plot. The reason I'm not too big of a fan of Blue as a rival (but I am of him as a gym leader) is because he only really fits one of those two criteria. All he is is an obstacle to get over. Why is he even challenging you at Silph Co. lol? Granted, he is the first rival, to be fair, so it's a bit extreme to expect something other than basic. Silver only fits one of those criteria, namely the second one. Great story and everything but his battles are all too easy. Brenden/May fit both until you get to a certain point, and then end up fitting neither, unless you play ORAS where they at least retain the second criteria throughout. Barry fits both perfectly, which is why I believe he's the best rival. I don't really remember much past gen 4, however.
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The amount of pokemon fans who complain about the poor quality of games due to shorter and shorter development cycles, but then buy the games/DLC on release date every time is absurd and makes pokemon fans look like jokes. Is it that hard to recognize that no matter how much you complain, if you buy the games yearly, you are telling Nintendo/Game freak to keep making them yearly?
BTW this isn't directed at any particular person or anything, just a general trend among some fans.
BTW this isn't directed at any particular person or anything, just a general trend among some fans.
The fans who cheer those changes on/don't give a damn/think the fans who do care are being whiny babies will pretty much always outbuy the boycotters (or anyone making noise generally).
Imagine if the Switch also had a bunch of other games very worth the price, featured portability for playing on the go, and if we stopped implying that buying 3-400 bucks of Switch just for Pokemon is something anyone with a functioning brain would do.So this is why I still don't have a Switch
You don't buy a console for one game.
And if you do, reconsider your life priorityes.
Buying a Switch should have nothing to do with Pokemon.
Sounds like what Klara and Avery did on their 3rd battle, when they battle you with Toxic Spikes or Psychic Terrain respectively. Which is why I said before, it surprises me something like this took 8 generations and a dlc to do so.
This is something done by plenty of fangames, like Reborn and Rejuvenation, where every terrain has its own mechanics and you have to adapt to them. eg: the fairy tale field add Dragon typing to Fire attacks, so they lose advantage against Steel. Although sometimes they go way too far with the difficulty, Rejuvenation for example introduces plenty of op cheated mons and exclusive moves (like a Sandstorm version of Aurora Veil, let that sink in, A SANDSTORM VERSION OF AURORA VEIL!)
I mean true, but I legit don't care much for the 1st party, or even close second party. And everytime someone's suggests 3rd party, I simply look at Steam
Not to mention the console itself is shoddily built, online is a mess, and I already was screwed over for Wii U thinking it'd get better
Yes, I bought the game and DLC on day one... and that makes me a customer therefore I have the right to complain about it. If there's something about the game I don't like, I'm going to raise my voice about it to see if anyone else agrees with me. And if there's enough of us, maybe somehow, someway, that criticism will reach back to GF and they could use that criticism to at the very least not do the same mistake they did.
Because, sure, now people buy the games even if they find some parts of it shoddy, but GF can't keep doing that cause eventually people may just stop buying the games when they've finally reached an "enough" point.
All else I'm going to say is that, now that GF is right across the street from Nintendo's main headquarters, maybe there's a chance we'll see a quality improvement now that GF could just go over to them and ask for a cup of programmers.
I mean, that's fair and all, and way more of a reason to not buy the Switch than just "i don't think Sword and Shield are worth the price" :P
(expecially as even if they were the best games on the planet, they'd still not be worth upwards of 500€)
While I can't say that there weren't people that fell into this category, I believe that there is far less overlap between people who complained about sword and shield before launch and people who actually bought it then most give credit for.
While the criticisms of Sword and Shield are very vocal, looking at the raw numbers of sales(becoming the third best selling games in the series after Red/Green/Blue and Gold/Silver, which largely had the pokemania of the later 90's/early 00's to help with those high numbers) shows that trying to use the vocal internet opinions to gauge things like this as a whole usually ends up leading to completely different results.
There are more casual Pokemon players then most people think, ones that don't go to Pokemon or even gaming-themed websites to discuss the series in-depth They buy the games, beat the main story, and then put them down after that, not bothering with PvP or post-game content. The things people are most likely to criticize about the games simply do not effect them or their enjoyment of the game directly.
Yeah, i've been pointing this for a while.
Honestly, it's not even just for Pokemon.
Nowadays it's common in a lot of other gaming communities, from single players to mobas to mmos to whatever, to have a <extremely loud> minority that rages on the internets, and then a huge silent majority that buys the games, enjoys the fun, and puts them down.
At the same time, I do not think super majorly pandering to casual players would be the best route either unless they are already your top priority audience, since while it would increase sales even more, it would also dumb things down and even potentially eliminate what depth the gaming franchise had and even run the danger of making the weak points even worse, all while completely ignoring the biggest criticisms the hardcore fans or even a few normal fans had made.
This can run the danger of homogenizing the franchise and become unable to improve for sake of raking as much cash as possible, even reaching the point where even losing a great part of fanbase would not affect the franchise aside of making that franchise seen as a "casual franchise".
Focusing exclusively or heavily on the casual audience also does not work that well in the long term in terms of sales. Yes, it would increase sales even more-in the short term. But that's the thing: casual audiences will not stick around for the long term. For many reasons stated above, making the games to focus on casuals means that you focus on an audience that will gain interest quickly for the short term, but then lose interest just as quickly. At the same time, the content would not be enough for more core players (and by extension, hardcore players), and it would eventually heavily alienate them. This isn't going to work well long term because in the long term you will lose the core players quickly, and you will eventually lose the casual players at some point because Pokemon won't be "cool" to them anymore at some point, and then it will struggle to gain the interest of either crowd. Ultimately leading to them actually getting less long term sales as they will eventually fall down.
Look at the Wii U for instance. One of the big reasons it failed so miserably commercially is not just its bad marketing (attachment to the original Wii name), but because of the way the original Wii itself was marketed. The Wii was a prime example of a thing that was designed to heavily pander to the casual crowd. Yes, it was financially extremely successful, but it was so heavily pandered to the casual crowd that it alienated most of the core audience who did not like it, perceived it as a "kiddy console", and shunned it in lieu of the PS3 or 360. So while it sold many units, most of the people who actually bought the Wii (note, I am not saying all that there were no core/hardcore Wii players: there were still core players who enjoyed the Wii and its first party stuff, but they were a minority) ditched it in a few years, it became a dust-gathering thing in the closet of many homes, and most people moved on to the next fad like Angry Birds or whatever was popular later. Then the Wii U came out, and people thought it was an add-on to the Wii because of the way it was marketed. Why was that a recipe for disaster? Because the Wii name had more or less died out: no one in the casual crowd cared about the original Wii anymore, and the core players had a bitter taste in their mouths because of the Wii's casual pandering alienating them from Nintendo and especially the Wii name. Ultimately leading to a struggle for the Wii U to sell well in its entire lifespan, and despite being a great console with a lot of awesome first-party exclusives, it sold poorly and died an early death.
This is relevant in that if you were to pander Pokemon to make it focus exclusively on the casual crowd, it would not only homogenize the franchise and make it unable to improve, this would lead to two things: the core players who are invested in Pokemon in the long term will get mad and start complaining, and after a while will dissociate with the franchise out of frustration, and the casual players will lose interest at some point because to them, "Pokemon" will one day cease to be "cool" to them and they will move on to the next cool fad or whatnot. Meaning this would lead to Pokemon titles eventually struggling to succeed in the long term as future games will eventually start struggling to sell well, and eventually you'd start reaching a point where it'll start having repeated failed titles over the years. Point being, it's not a good strategy for the long term and it will only garner in higher amounts of cash in the short term but failure in the long term. Maybe it will take a loooong time for casuals to lose interest, but still: it will happen at some point in time.
If Pokemon wants to survive for the long term, and actually work to be better quality in the long term, at the same time it still needs to acknowledge the criticisms from the "loud minority" in some way, shape, or form. The core and even the hardcore audience is what will keep the franchise sustainable in the long term because there will be people who are interested in sticking with the franchise for the long haul, and they will want the franchise to be better and the games to be better quality. It needs to work towards being better quality for core audiences if it's going to stay around long term and not just rake in cash for the short term, because core players can and will be fed up at some point otherwise, and casual fans will one day lose interest too because the "fad" value of Pokemon cannot last forever: the fad value will one day die and not many people will care about it anymore.
Look at the Wii U for instance. One of the big reasons it failed so miserably commercially is not just its bad marketing (attachment to the original Wii name), but because of the way the original Wii itself was marketed. The Wii was a prime example of a thing that was designed to heavily pander to the casual crowd. Yes, it was financially extremely successful, but it was so heavily pandered to the casual crowd that it alienated most of the core audience who did not like it, perceived it as a "kiddy console", and shunned it in lieu of the PS3 or 360. So while it sold many units, most of the people who actually bought the Wii (note, I am not saying all that there were no core/hardcore Wii players: there were still core players who enjoyed the Wii and its first party stuff, but they were a minority) ditched it in a few years, it became a dust-gathering thing in the closet of many homes, and most people moved on to the next fad like Angry Birds or whatever was popular later. Then the Wii U came out, and people thought it was an add-on to the Wii because of the way it was marketed. Why was that a recipe for disaster? Because the Wii name had more or less died out: no one in the casual crowd cared about the original Wii anymore, and the core players had a bitter taste in their mouths because of the Wii's casual pandering alienating them from Nintendo and especially the Wii name. Ultimately leading to a struggle for the Wii U to sell well in its entire lifespan, and despite being a great console with a lot of awesome first-party exclusives, it sold poorly and died an early death.
This is relevant in that if you were to pander Pokemon to make it focus exclusively on the casual crowd, it would not only homogenize the franchise and make it unable to improve, this would lead to two things: the core players who are invested in Pokemon in the long term will get mad and start complaining, and after a while will dissociate with the franchise out of frustration, and the casual players will lose interest at some point because to them, "Pokemon" will one day cease to be "cool" to them and they will move on to the next cool fad or whatnot. Meaning this would lead to Pokemon titles eventually struggling to succeed in the long term as future games will eventually start struggling to sell well, and eventually you'd start reaching a point where it'll start having repeated failed titles over the years. Point being, it's not a good strategy for the long term and it will only garner in higher amounts of cash in the short term but failure in the long term. Maybe it will take a loooong time for casuals to lose interest, but still: it will happen at some point in time.
If Pokemon wants to survive for the long term, and actually work to be better quality in the long term, at the same time it still needs to acknowledge the criticisms from the "loud minority" in some way, shape, or form. The core and even the hardcore audience is what will keep the franchise sustainable in the long term because there will be people who are interested in sticking with the franchise for the long haul, and they will want the franchise to be better and the games to be better quality. It needs to work towards being better quality for core audiences if it's going to stay around long term and not just rake in cash for the short term, because core players can and will be fed up at some point otherwise, and casual fans will one day lose interest too because the "fad" value of Pokemon cannot last forever: the fad value will one day die and not many people will care about it anymore.
While I would prefer to keep most of the currently existing depth in Pokemon myself, the franchise is 24 years old, about 3 months away from 25 years. You are talking about it like the fad phase of the franchise hadn't died by 2002. You are confusing casual fans for fad-chasers. On top of new blood in the form of kids, there are plenty of people that have bought every game since Gen I that could give less of a hoot about the complaints thrown in Sword and Shield's direction. I know plenty of those in real life. I understand if this being primarily a competitive/non-casual website makes this seem not likely due to the people we regularly see on here, but it is the reality of things.
I've definitely been burned by Dyna Adventures teammates so I want to agree, but if anything today's kids have much greater access to info than we ever did. Like we can trash talk them all we want but I clearly remember putting 40 hours into Pokemon Red without beating the Elite 4, only finally breaking Lance after my friend taught me how to make a deal with the Missingno to get a few hundred Rare Candies. What little unreliable info I could find off Internet Explorer via dial-up on my Windows 98 just led me on endless goose chases hunting Chrono Mew under trucks and the illustrious Pokegods. I remember begging my Mom to stay at EB games a few more minutes so I could read how to finish the puzzle in Victory Road. Also Special stat? What the fuck even was that? My Surf Kingler and Ice Punch Hitmonchan don't care, high attack is all they need!!
If I was to play any of the newer games at the same age I was when I first played Red I absolutely would have been more successful. Guides, Youtube, and resources like Serebii would allow me access to a wealth of reliable info that 9 year old me would have killed for.
Also contrary to what people seem to claim games now are a LOT harder than in at least Red / Blue and G/S. With the exception of Misty there's almost literally zero difficult battles. Many of Gary's Pokemon don't even have STAB moves... Only Lorelei is vaguely difficult in the Elite 4 and most of that is just from Lapras being so fat. G/S is only vaguely difficult due to the weird level curve but if you know the type chart as per usual it's just a matter of "bring something they're weak to". It was only gens 4-5 that had any real amount of difficulty and with some planning even a child should be able to do just fine. But like, the gens we grew up with were easy. Just look at the R/S Elite 4 and tell me it's as tough as we remember. Even D/P and B/W were quite a bit easier than nostalgia tells us. Cynthia is tough for a teenager but most of her Pokemon aren't THAT hard to defeat if you know what to hit them with. Her Milotic doesn't even have a healing move! I actually think the hardest Pokemon game I ever played was Ultra Sun because on more than one occasion I was totally team wiped, knocked on my ass so hard that I actually had to stop and re-evaluate my strategy. Those totem battles were hard! I cheesed through SwSh with a level 100 Greedent but I have to respect that Leon is probably the most difficult champion ever. At least most of his Pokemon understand the physical / special split!
I think in reality Pokemon is a deeply complicated game. Everyone reading this has probably mastered at least the basics of competitive battles and thus likely knows by heart the movepools, abilities, typing, stats and so on of nearly every single Pokemon in the game. That's a LOT of info to learn!
tl;dr newer players are most likely better than we were at their age, but we're grown ass adults playing a child's slave rancher game so it's kinda hard to trash talk them for not memorizing every single Pokemon's type weaknesses when we've been learning for the past two decades.
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While the earlier games can be easy with enough planning, keep in mind that newer players most likely would not be planning to build a cohesive and balanced team. Newer players would usually pick the Pokemon they like aesthetically, whether cute or cool, and these can be a challenge to newer players if they stack up weaknesses or pick weak Pokemon. I remember a friend who was new to Pokemon: picked Squirtle as a starter then also had Kingler and Seaking on the team because that person loved Water Pokemon. That person would end up struggling to break Lorelei and Lance. Newer players most likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference between physical and special moves along with its relation to the Attack at Special Attack stat so their Pokemon might end up having suboptimal movesets (e.g. Surf Rhydon, STABs on Sneasel). The TMs back then were also one time use, so that makes it more difficult to give optimal movesets for your Pokemon. You used your Earthquake TM on Rhydon? Now your Charizard won't have good coverage against Rock-types.
Also, one of the things that made earlier gen games difficult was that there were no route NPCs to heal your Pokemon. Your rivals won't give you the chance to heal before battle either. This means that your team can be worn down by route trainers then your rival can just pop up and challenge your weakened team. Even if your rival's Pokemon had mediocre moves, they would still be able to overwhelm your worn down team. You can buy a lot of potions to remedy this but that would drain the limited money you have. That's what made the earlier games challenging and thrilling in my opinion.
TL;DR While it's easy to underestimate the difficulty of the earlier games, the lack of NPCs healing your Pokemon every 15 minutes made the games more challenging. The newer players' lack of knowledge also bites since move information was not presented to them on the spot unlike today's games.
Most trainers in R/B just had their level up moves meaning the average battle consisted of fighting against Pokemon who's strongest attack was Peck, Sludge, or Horn Attack... literally up until the Elite 4. Just look at the Gym Leaders. Giovanni, the ground type gym leader, has one single ground move on his entire team. If we assume a player is able to at least access a type chart beating Red / Blue is easy. Suboptimal movesets isn't a measure of difficulty it's just bad game design. I don't think there's any single point in Red / Blue where they explain to you what the Special stat is. Everything you mentioned about inexperience applies to newer games just as it does older gens. The difference is that movesets are genuinely terrible in R/B. So incredibly bad that only about half the Elite 4's Pokemon have STAB moves. Far worse than any other game. That's not to say an inexperienced player won't have trouble, just that as far as difficulty goes R/B is probably the bottom of the barrel.
I never found NPC healing to really matter. I mean what, it just saved me 30 seconds reaching into my bag to find a potion or maybe 5 minutes flying back to the Pokémon center. It doesn't make it easier, just slightly less frustrating now that you're less likely to backtrack.