Unpopular opinions

Codraroll said:
As for ORAS, well, it's a personal opinion of mine that Hoenn looks better than Sinnoh, partially due to the latter having to make too many concessions to achieve that semi-3D style. That means that terrain shapes had to be very simplistic, buildings were largely cuboids, there were fewer types of trees, and simpler terrain textures. Hoenn had great detail in its overworld art style because it was all sprite-based. Sinnoh used 3D elements, and those had to be made quite simple for the DS to be able to process them. Just look at the functionally identical locations of Ever Grande City and Sinnoh's Pokémon League, for instance. Or the top of Mt. Pyre vs. the top of Mt. Coronet. There is a level of detail, scale, and complexity in the terrain of Hoenn you simply don't find in the terrain of Sinnoh.
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Well I think a lot of Sinnoh's Plain color palette is due to fact it was based off the Hokkaido region, and that region known for farmland, so its going to be very plain in contrast to Kyushu's tropics, which is what Hoenn was based off of.

Anyway, there's also another reason why remakes are done in the first place, with the exception of Let's Go, which was not a traditional Pokemon game. Remakes are often made with the intent of allowing Pokemon to be obtained the sane generation without the aid of previous hardware. FRLG were made with the intention of allowing players to obtain Kanto and Johto Pokemon missing from RS while Emerald allowed you obtain the missing Johto Pokemon not in FRLG should you not have Colosseium or XD.

HGSS, in addition of allowing the capture of Johto and Kanto Pokemon, also allowed you to obtain Hoenn starters and Legendaries because the developers specifically wanted to remove reliance on GBA games for completing the National Dex.

Between XY and ORAS, every Pokemon can obtained in Gen 6 without trading.

With Dexit and the removal of the National Dex, SwSh will never have to rely on another pair of games to complete their Pokedex. And this might be an unpopular opinion, but that's why I think that was the primary reason why remakes are made in the first place. DP also had at the time, the largest amount of available Pokemon in the entire series up to that point, with 445 available between both games out of 493. The majority of missing Pokemon were either starters, Legendaries, and mythical Pokemon. Its pretty much opposite of how SwSh excluded half of all existing Pokemon until the DLC hit the world. A remake of DP would require all these Pokemon to be programmed in the game in order to be faithful, which goes against the current design philosophy. I'll only consider getting them if they include all the missing Pokemon to SwSh, and those Pokemon can be traded to SwSh.

And here's definitely an unpopular opinion. Sinnoh remakes should have come out before Hoenn remakes, or at the very least at, during Gen 7. Why? Sinnoh was built around a touch screen. Minigames like Poffins, Poketch, underground, contests, Wifi plaza, all required use of the touch screen. Trying to translate these into Switch would be very difficult due to the lack of a touch screen- can imagine the underground mini game on the switch? The most logical replacement would probably be motion control, but can you imagine doing poffin making and the underground mini game with motion controls? That sounds so soreful for your wrists. And there's the issues of translating that to handheld mode. In conclusion, DP have a lot features that relied on touchscreen and don't simply translate well to switch. Trying to remove these features would strip Sinnoh of its identity and not be a faithful remake.

On the other hand, Hoenn not built around of a touchscreen, so a lot of its UI and mini games wouldn't be so hard to translate onto Switch. Even the battle UI resembles the GBA days. In my opinion, the best time for a DP remake would have been Gen 7, since it was the last games to feature touchscreen and every Pokemon in existence ( Should have given us DP remakes instead of USM and Let's Go. )

I also Yung Dramps with that its unlikely for DP remakes to celebrate the 20th Anniversary. They purposely skipped over XY followups to profit off the hypes of a new game rather than give XY its third version, nothing has happened since then to make me think that anything would change now.
 
At this point, it's impossible to predict what will happen. Saying that a certain thing is "unlikely" to happen next, such as DP remakes for example, being "unlikely", is just as presumptuous as saying that they definitively *will* happen. It is not a good idea to assume anything as a likely or unlikely thing that will happen because Game Freak has become increasingly unpredictable over the years, so you never know what they might be cooking up. As they've shown over the past decade, they really are not very predictable at all nowadays.

I also think that using the Pokemon Z situation as an argument as to why DP remakes (or any sort of remake, like say, another Johto or even Kanto game) wouldn't happen is pretty flawed, because third versions and remakes are fundamentally different from a marketing standpoint, and there are quite a few holes in that line of reasoning:

  • Remakes have the advantage of coming out several years after the original games came out, well past when the original games were at their prime. Third versions don't have this luxury, coming within at most two years after the original paired release, at a time when said games are still "the" Pokemon games on the market. In other words, remakes have the advantage in terms of sales, because they also have a new audience of kids to recruit into the experience of that particular region. HGSS and ORAS, for example, had the new kids who got into the franchise through DP or XY to ride on and experience Johto or Hoenn for the first time ever. A third version does not have this advantage.
  • The above point also shows with how the sales of remakes do compared to third versions. Let's take a look at each "category" of games and look at how they've sold, for example:
Base Games

Ruby and Sapphire: 16.22 million
Diamond and Pearl: 17.67 million
Black and White: 15.64 million
X and Y: 16.49 million
Sun and Moon: 16.20 million
Sword and Shield: 20.35 million

Remakes

FireRed and LeafGreen: 12 million
HeartGold and SoulSilver: 12.72 million
Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire: 14.34 million

Third Versions/Sequels

Emerald: 7 million
Platinum: 7.6 million
Black and White 2: 8.52 million
Ultra Sun and Moon: 8.89 million

  • As you can see above, there's a good deal more sales you can get out of remakes than you do third versions, which don't get that many sales to boast. Remakes are still "fresh" to a good deal of the Pokemon audience, that is the new kids who got in with Gen 8, and to them they still have a new experience so there's still that audience to ride off of.
  • Game Freak clearly fundamentally sees remake titles as effectively brand new games, unlike with a third/upper version (as they call it). The President of TPC flat out said about FireRed and LeafGreen once that "we don't consider them to be remakes at all. We feel that this is a new game". It's very clear that even remakes are still treated as brand new, fresh titles. Remakes come loooong after the originals anyway, when there's a new audience for them to experience the region for the first time, and they incorporate aspects from that generation and thrive on Pokemon's tendency to "recruit" new kids into the franchise.
  • Pokemon Z was likely not "purposefully skipped over" for Sun and Moon. What more likely happened there was that there were two different teams working on both at the same time at one point, with the A team working on SM for the 20th anniversary, and the B team working on Z, which would have come out in 2015 had things gone as planned, with Sun and Moon coming the following year. The likely scenario was that at some point, Sun and Moon was facing development troubles that made the A team apprehensive they wouldn't be able to get it polished in time, so the B team had to scrap Z and serve as additional manpower for Sun and Moon to ensure that they could get it to become a solid product in time for the 20th anniversary (as SM was likely the intended 20th anniversary game from the get-go and likely started development soon after X and Y finished development). This is evident in the traces of Zygarde placed in Sun and Moon, making it likely that the B team had to put their scrapped ideas for Z into it so their ideas weren't totally gone.

Point being, using the Z situation as a comparison point isn't really a fair comparison when 1) Remakes and "upper versions" have fundamentally different niches from a marketing standpoint, and 2) Pokemon Z, had it happened, was not likely to have been for 2016 in the first place, and would've been a 2015 title to align with Game Freak's annual release schedule that they've been adhering to lately.

In any case, it is extremely presumptuous to assume anything is or isn't going to happen this year or next or whatever. Game Freak is not a developer you can really predict with what they're going to do nowadays, and if they decide they want to do Sinnoh Remakes, they'll do it, whatever apprehensions we have about them be damned. If they decide to do Let's Go Johto, yeah that'll happen if they want to. We don't know what they're planning next and I would hold off on making any assumptions about what Game Freak is or isn't interested in until we hear any official announcements from them, which should be pretty soon considering Pokemon Day is coming in less than two weeks.

Long story short, I always run by the mantra "Don't assume anything" in cases like this. Don't assume anything is unlikely or likely to happen, because at this point it's more or less not possible to really know what will happen.
 
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Pikachu315111 said:
I did the math a while ago but it wouldn't be impossible for GF to put every past game into one Switch cartridge:
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I usually don't consider that but rather than could I think about if they would. And I don't think the Pokemon company, especially with Nintendo having shares, would give the consumers so many games even for an anniversary pack for free.

Just look at the Mario Anniversaries of the recent years. They put the SNES rom without any adjustments into a CD with some soundtracks and an artbook with barely any information about the games for the Wii and the most recent Mario 3D allstars which had 3 of 4 Major 3D Mario games, despite being able to fit all 4, and 64 hasn't it's graphics remade for the modern audience. They just added the 3 games running on an emulator, with slid updates to the textures (hardly noticable) and again add some music you can only listen on the title screen... Not even an artbook, but I guess telling us when the game came out with one random trivia in the title screen is enough

sry for the rant, but I feel Mario deserves a little better.
 
mertyville said:
And I don't think the Pokemon company, especially with Nintendo having shares, would give the consumers so many games even for an anniversary pack for free.
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Well, obviously they should charge for it (likely $60). Unless you meant they wouldn't put that many Pokemon games in one cartridge and sell for a price or a normal game, which in that case I know but I'm saying it's theoretically possible.

mertyville said:
and the most recent Mario 3D allstars which had 3 of 4 Major 3D Mario games, despite being able to fit all 4
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By 4 you mean Galaxy 2, right? That is a very odd exclusion. Heck, I also think they should have added the DS remake for Mario 64 since it's almost a different game but uses mostly the same level layout and assets (though it had updated graphics making it look like a more modern Mario game).
 
Pikachu315111 said:
Well, obviously they should charge for it (likely $60). Unless you meant they wouldn't put that many Pokemon games in one cartridge and sell for a price or a normal game, which in that case I know but I'm saying it's theoretically possible.



By 4 you mean Galaxy 2, right? That is a very odd exclusion. Heck, I also think they should have added the DS remake for Mario 64 since it's almost a different game but uses mostly the same level layout and assets (though it had updated graphics making it look like a more modern Mario game).
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yes, I meant the later. I don't know why for free instead of "for them basically for free".
GF seems like a company, if they do a collection like that, you would get 3 games with 1 representing each generation and sell that for 60 bucks, and maybe some music to listen to.

And I just realized I described the way Mario was treated recently, but worse because these 3 games may not even take a fraction out of the cardridge.
 
Given Gamefreak's awful track record since XY, I'd rather DP remakes never be made by them. Don't taint the DS era, the best years of the franchise (to me), with current Gamefreak's stink. And they'd ignore many of the improvements made by Platinum as well. I can't see DP remakes being anything more than insulting to the base games and dumpster fires nowadays.
 
Pikachu315111 said:
Seriously, where did this idea that kids have a short attention span with games come from? Is there any research the shows they'll drop a game if it presents them a little challenge? It's a stereotype with no basis. Only the most inattentive kid would give up that easily (I doubt they would have even reached Allister let alone sit through all the cutscenes).
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Just stopping by to provide a counterpoint on challenge in kids games: Rayman 1 from 1995 is what happens when challenge from a friendly looking game goes too far. The game looks like this, it's beautiful:

1613754934478.png


How bad is it?

https://venturebeat.com/community/2013/11/11/rayman-the-most-punishing-game-on-the-psone/

That article about sums it up. 5 continues, have to 100% the game to actually beat it, and the tiny detail that extra lives don't respawn in prior levels. Oh yeah, and the out of nowhere enemy and collectible spawns upon reaching certain spots are the most dirty trick I've ever seen a game pull.

The newer Pokemon games may be easy, but they absolutely don't need to go in the opposite direction either. A lot of ROM hacks make this mistake.

I know this isn't entirely related to Pokemon, but play Rayman 1 and try not to use cheat codes or rage quit, it's stupid.
 
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A random thought I had on the nice rival vs jerk rival issue.

We stopped getting jerk rivals around the same time we started getting rivals who took the starter weak to the player character's pick. If we assume there's a causal relationship here, we would then want to look at the underlying reason why this change in the rival's mon selection occurred. An easy guess for that would be because starter began knowing STAB moves when first obtained, and giving the first rival fight the significant advantage that comes with SE STAB when the player has next to no options around it would be unfair. This could then lead back to there being more friendly rivals after this change. After all, there's no reason why someone whose main character trait is trying to prove themselves better than the player would pick something weak to them, right?

Let's look at Silver. He had no knowledge of the player's choice when he took his starter, and his character arc is defined by his original lack of knowledge of some aspects of what makes pokemon effective (for a gameplay effect, look at how long it takes him to evolve golbat). Nothing in the plot requires Silver to have the starter with an advantage over the player. A new jerk rival could have similar characterizations, potentially swapping out "no knowledge of player's choice" with "just picks one at random because they wanted the one the player took" or "doesn't understand type matchups starting out (hey, if GF keeps assuming the player doesn't know...)." Then you could have them frustrated at losing the early encounter, and later fights with them could have their team optimized in ways other than trying to get SE typing, such as good neutral coverage, status effects, or smart use of held items. Alternately, they find a non-starter ace (could be doubled up with a Tinted Lens mon)

Wow, this started as "maybe jerk rivals aren't impossible" and turned into "what if there was someone whose game plan was 'screw type matchups, I've got Choice Band earthquakes'"
 
mertyville said:
Those rumors that the legendary beasts are revived Eeveelutions and as a kid believing Ho-oh and Lugia being part of the Legendary Birds but on a higher hierachy made me want a Dark and Psychic Legendary Beast.
Honestly, I still wouldn't mind expanding them. I mean it can still be possible that Ho-oh revived Pokemon turning them into a new set of legendaries.
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A few years back I had this little fun idea of creating a new member for each of the trios; don't exactly remember why but I was able to come up with some creative ideas if I do say so myself. I think would be wishlisting if I listed all my ideas or went into much detail, so I'll keep it basic for the Legendary Beast: I made it Steel-type as a reference to both the generation names and the towers being metals.

Funny enough I also actually made two new Regi instead of one (one was Ground-type with dots shaped like a Pyramid, the other was a Type I made-up with dots shaped like two diamonds). Surprise, surprise, years later they reveal they are making two new Regi, though as we know they made a Dragon and Electric-type... which means my two Regi are still valid, original characters, do not steal.

DrumstickGaming said:
The newer Pokemon games may be easy, but they absolutely don't need to go in the opposite direction either. A lot of ROM hacks make this mistake.
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I Never said they should make it super hard.

If you get right down to it, all I ask is if they did a better job as level scaling (also maybe let players turn off the Exp. Share; have it on by default by all means but let players turn it off) and gave the bosses (Rivals, Gym Leaders, villain team admins/boss, Elite Four, etc.) teams that have thought put into them (following a strategy, coverage moves, letting their Pokemon have hold items, etc.).

Now doing so might create a scenario where the player can't win just by clicking the super effective attack a few times the first time they battle the boss. BUT that's all right. It just means they need to come with some workarounds the bosses' strategy or maybe grinding a few levels.

And the worst punishment you get from losing is just going back to the last Pokemon Center and some pocket change, no big deal. And you're not asked to beat the boss without having a Pokemon faint, as long as you have one Pokemon when you knock out the bosses' last Pokemon that's enough to let you progress.

Ironmage said:
We stopped getting jerk rivals around the same time we started getting rivals who took the starter weak to the player character's pick.
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No. GF themselves said they stopped jerk rivals after Gen II because on the Gameboy they wanted to emphasize personality of the characters as they couldn't do so graphically and it was easier to do that with a jerk rival.

I also have a personal theory they stopped because they knew kids were likely naming the rivals after friends and family members not knowing any better, so didn't want kids to associate their real like friends/family members to being jerks.

Probably because of both reasons did Gen III have friendly rivals but they also couldn't be named. Gen IV allowed for naming but still kept the friend aspect so now you could pretend the rival was your friend/family member going on an adventure with you. And BW onwards I feel the reasons for having the rivals the way they were split from this thinking and rather focused on theme of the games.
 
Pikachu315111 said:
I Never said they should make it super hard.

If you get right down to it, all I ask is if they did a better job as level scaling (also maybe let players turn off the Exp. Share; have it on by default by all means but let players turn it off) and gave the bosses (Rivals, Gym Leaders, villain team admins/boss, Elite Four, etc.) teams that have thought put into them (following a strategy, coverage moves, letting their Pokemon have hold items, etc.).

Now doing so might create a scenario where the player can't win just by clicking the super effective attack a few times the first time they battle the boss. BUT that's all right. It just means they need to come with some workarounds the bosses' strategy or maybe grinding a few levels.

And the worst punishment you get from losing is just going back to the last Pokemon Center and some pocket change, no big deal. And you're not asked to beat the boss without having a Pokemon faint, as long as you have one Pokemon when you knock out the bosses' last Pokemon that's enough to let you progress.
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Yeah you didn’t say that. I apologize.

Overly edgy themes and difficulty in relatively kid-friendly works or former kid-friendly works is just kinda my berserk button. I feel like some works try too hard to pander to the older crowd.

An example of the latter is almost everything about the game Jak II. It is my least favorite game of all time. I probably could cut fruit with the edges of the game’s plot. If you put screenshots of The Precursor Legacy and Jak Ii: side by side, they would look like games from entirely different series. Being murderously difficult and lacking checkpoints didn’t help either.

But yeah. I wouldn’t mind a little more difficulty in the newer games but they don’t need to go overboard ever. Sorry for using your old comment to make that point. And apologies for diverting the discussion away from Pokémon - overly difficult games just really get my goat.
 
I have said it before but Pokemon isn't and never was a difficult game. If anything newer games are a lot less tedious and grind-demanding than the older games, and having played the older gens recently with hindsight in mind many of the old games are pretty shockingly easy if you go out of your way to grind and put in the time and effort to level your Pokemon.

All that's really different now is that the newer games don't demand as much level grinding as past games did. Grinding is not difficulty and neither is making yourself sorely underleveled compared to the NPC opponents (the former is tedium and it's not exactly fun, the latter is also not genuine difficulty because the favor is inherently rigged in the opponent's favor because their levels are much higher). I went out of my way to grind in Sapphire lately by hunting down all the Trainers in the Trainer's Eyes and rematched them as per the level curve and after I did that, I found my team of six to not only be constantly ten levels higher than nearly every route Trainer, I was overleveled for the later Gym Leaders and stomped on them all with ease. The Hoenn Elite Four in the original RS was also hilariously easy: after doing as many Trainer rematches as I could my team by the time I reached the League was in the low 50s, and I curbstomped the entire Elite Four with relative ease: Steven included (in fact, he was laughably easy to defeat).

Also, the Kanto games, including FRLG, are also really easy and even the older games were not very hard at all (especially RGBY: look at the movesets, they're terrible).

In fact, when you look at the movesets and Pokemon that bosses in past games have used, you'll find that most of them across the generations are not all that good. There have historically only been a few exceptions: one of them is Whitney's Miltank, and that's a case where the Pokemon is disproportionately strong compared to the Pokemon you will likely have by that point, and the moveset relies a lot on rigging the RNG in Whitney's favor (Attract and Stomp), and Clair's Kingdra, which has an accuracy lowering move.

In fact, looking through the games I'd say the only cases where the Pokemon games have had any semblance of difficulty are arguably the Johto games, SM and USUM, and arguably BW2's Challenge Mode (and maybe even BW1). Those are cases where the bosses used legitimately interesting movesets, and in the Totem Pokemon's case, they had teammates that provided support in the best ways possible.

Speaking of which, I'd argue that of all the games so far Sun and Moon (and USUM even moreso) are actually the best executed in terms of Pokemon games that are actually challenging. The Totem Pokemon legitimately had well thought out movesets, clever use of items, and same with their SOS Pokemon who in many ways provided strong support to them to make legitimately challenging battles. Considering that's one of the newer games, and Gen 7 being one of the few that executed legitimate challenge well, I'd say they've definitely tried to implement real challenge in a newer game. I don't know how people generally feel about these but it says something when Totem Lurantis is one of the most memorable boss fights in history for how difficult it truly was. And that's even *with* the EXP Share on, for the record.
 
Sonikku A said:
Something funny is how there's a change for Emerald where the Rival hides their anger at losing at Route119. Scott comes by and notes it, much to the player's surprise

...Come to think of it, Scott's kinda rude with how blunt he is
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Yeah Scott was an almost entirely pointless addition to Emerald. You don’t need an entirely new character to advertise a new feature (hi Ultra Recon Squad! Not entirely the same thing but they were also pointless characters despite showing up more than you’d think they do).

Similarly, I think Charon is the worst case of “they wasted a perfectly good character” in all of the games. He never battles you and to my knowledge never does almost anything plot relevant. He has that special sprite in the intro that looks like a reversed battle backsprite almost. You’d think he could serve as a replacement for that entirely pointless Saturn rematch (as Saturn is by far and away the easiest of the admins and doesn’t get any harder between battles aside from having actual coverage on Toxicroak).

Cases of the third version or in one case BW2 introducing characters that are meaningful include characters like Looker and Colress. They actually do things and aren’t just there for the sake of “Look! We added extra content!”
 
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DrumstickGaming said:
Yeah Scott was an almost entirely pointless addition to Emerald. You don’t need an entirely new character to advertise a new feature (hi Ultra Recon Squad! Not entirely the same thing but they were also pointless characters despite showing up more than you’d think they do).

Similarly, I think Charon is the worst case of “they wasted a perfectly good character” in all of the games. He never battles you and to my knowledge never does almost anything plot relevant. He has that special sprite in the intro that looks like a reversed battle backsprite almost. You’d think he could serve as a replacement for that entirely pointless Saturn rematch (as Saturn is by far and away the easiest of the admins and doesn’t get any harder between battles aside from having actual coverage on Toxicroak).

Cases of the third version or in one case BW2 introducing characters that are meaningful include characters like Looker and Colress. They actually do things and aren’t just there for the sake of “Look! We added extra content!”
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Maybe he was designed to promote the Frontier in Emerald?
 
ScraftyIsTheBest said:
I have said it before but Pokemon isn't and never was a difficult game.
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I don't think people necessarily want high difficulty in Pokémon. I've seen many posts about how that isn't really feasible given the current battle mechanics (free +100% damage bonus if you can identify the typing of the opponent and have the right move for it being the greatest example), static enemy teams, and the symmetrical design philosophy (anything you can face, you can also use - which Pokémon recently seems to have distanced itself from). The player simply has too many advantages. High difficulty is hard to create, and it probably wouldn't be very fun all in all either.

But people want a step up from a "poke the enemy and it keels over" level of difficulty too. There is something about seeing late-game Gym Leaders with three Pokémon with several empty moveslots, a total lack of route Trainers carrying more than two Pokémon, held items almost never being used, or a conspicuous lack of anything resembling strategy from in-game opponents. As a player, you don't feel like you're being challenged on even terms, Instead, the game deliberately restrains itself from battling you on your level. The rival deliberately picking the starter weak to yours is a great example of this. It's as if the game bends over to facilitate your victory, and it's being really obvious about it. That's frustrating. It's the difference between being challenged and being led to victory. Of climbing a wall versus going up an escalator.

Arguably, the Challenge Mode in BW2 doesn't make the game that much harder. Only a few trainers are affected by the setting, and them having higher-leveled Pokémon even means you're getting more XP to fight the common route trainers with. But still it feels good to see the Gym Leader having an extra Pokémon, with moves to address the glaring weaknesses of their specialty type. Or Elite Four teams full of held Items. It's the game letting itself play a little smarter, letting you face a higher level of challenge. It's still not particularly difficult, but it's not "Oh no, here comes the player, better do everything we can to let them win!" And that makes a world of difference.

The games don't have to be hard to be fun. But I'd say they need to be less in-your-face easy.
 
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