-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
Mechanics In Pokemon Legends: Arceus You'd Like To See In Future Titles
- Thread starter Count Bleck
- Start date
okay so maybe they still need to touch up the ai a little BUT STILL
Adding to this you know what's really great? The little thing telling yo uwhen you can evolve after the battle, even if they didn't level up. It goes off as soon as it meets the criteria so even if you, for example, reached a happiness threshold while walking around, it will still display the message and you can evolve then & there without needing to reach the next level. Location-based evolution, move-based evolution & Sligoo's rain based (+level 50) evolution all work similarly: provided you have the criteria you can just evolve instantly without needing to deal with battle
This isn't so much a game mechanic as a general design philosophy, but my ultimate takeaway from Legends Arceus is that Game Freak just needs to be less formulaic and free themselves to do whatever is needed for their vision of a specific region. To some extent I think this has been the case for a while (ya ever notice how XY was the last non-remake game to have the standard 8 gyms + Elite Four setup?), but now they have the conditions and playerbase support to go way further. From this point forth I expect that if future games reuse a "formula element" that they'll need to provide a good reason that has a very clear purpose in the context of the region. Galar had a rock-solid thematic reason to use Gyms, but whatever setting they make for Gen 9 might not. It might have the most traditional League + evil team structure possible or do something wildly different like PLA did. Whatever route they choose, it should be because that route is the optimal choice for that game and not just because "That's what Pokemon does". The devs need to follow their heart, not tradition.
As for actual granular gameplay features: Please maintain the battle flow and animations even with traditional combat. Going from this slick shit back to the SWSH way would be the worst look possible. Also keep the redone damage calculation formula, it's the most elegant solution to overleveling they've come up with.
As for actual granular gameplay features: Please maintain the battle flow and animations even with traditional combat. Going from this slick shit back to the SWSH way would be the worst look possible. Also keep the redone damage calculation formula, it's the most elegant solution to overleveling they've come up with.
nooooooooooooo
the new damage formula is terrible, it almost completely negates the effect of your attack stat. I'm cool with "under"-leveled stuff being more threatening, but this was not a good way to go about it.
uhhh to be more positive and in line with the thread I generally prefer the more involved+noticeable grit system to EVs, though the overall cap of EVs should be introduced to it if it's to return, at least for any competitive context.
I think my main issue there is that the workings of the turn order are not especially transparent. It's not at all obvious whether moves which let you take your next turn sooner will have an immediate effect, how the turn order will change if you switch, or how big the modifier is on moves like Roar of Time. The turn order preview isn't granular enough to facilitate this sort of strategising, in my opinion.
I like the PLA battle system in general, but it is disappointing to see them not learning from the gen 3-5 mistake of making the stat system unnecessarily opaque.
also in general I just feel like this type of battle system doesn't really work without multiple players on the field. FFX works in part because you at least have 3 folks, and I believe swapping in your backline is mostly free. There's just a lto of moving gears where the CTB can show its true strengths and occasional teeth. The enemy doing something to tweak their own turn order can be offset & reacted to by the characters not used yet.
here you get 1 at a time, unless you're in a special battle where you're fighting 2-3 enemies in which case its a 1v2 or 3. Swapping isn't necessarily free, and if the speed differential is REAL bad even a revenge kill isn't free. Sometimes your Agile will only give you the second turn 2 to 3 turns later and that's on the condition that the opponent doesnt use something of their own that offsets it. Strong moves are in contrast extremely punishing and difficult to find a time to really use depending on the move and Pokemon.
It always feels "off",never sure if you can get extra turns off or be dealing with a 3-turn combo from the opponent and getting out of a bad situation is often "just die and hope for the best" unless your pokemon is extremely bulky and you can burn a heal turn.
I dealt with it for this game since it was just a different experience over all and most battles you can play into the revenge-kill, and I could respect the Themes of having a battle system like this. But it's just really annoying and I generally liked pokemon's traditional system; I'd much rather than take Agile & Strong to the drawing board and figure out a way to balance them against the normal system if they took anything from this but theory crafting involved in THAT isn't really suited for this thread..
here you get 1 at a time, unless you're in a special battle where you're fighting 2-3 enemies in which case its a 1v2 or 3. Swapping isn't necessarily free, and if the speed differential is REAL bad even a revenge kill isn't free. Sometimes your Agile will only give you the second turn 2 to 3 turns later and that's on the condition that the opponent doesnt use something of their own that offsets it. Strong moves are in contrast extremely punishing and difficult to find a time to really use depending on the move and Pokemon.
It always feels "off",never sure if you can get extra turns off or be dealing with a 3-turn combo from the opponent and getting out of a bad situation is often "just die and hope for the best" unless your pokemon is extremely bulky and you can burn a heal turn.
I dealt with it for this game since it was just a different experience over all and most battles you can play into the revenge-kill, and I could respect the Themes of having a battle system like this. But it's just really annoying and I generally liked pokemon's traditional system; I'd much rather than take Agile & Strong to the drawing board and figure out a way to balance them against the normal system if they took anything from this but theory crafting involved in THAT isn't really suited for this thread..
From what little I've played thus far I think that crafting and research tasks should return. Battle styles are a neat concept but I think it needs tweaking before its used in a mainline game. As far as the whole Effort Level thing goes I haven't really gotten to use that system yet, but on its face it doesn't seem to be as customizable as the old EV/IV system was.
I only found out about this recently but apparently X-Scissor FINALLY has an increased critical hit ratio instead of nothing (yes, it really did have no secondary effect and was entirely outclassed by buffed Leech Life and Lunge all this time until now). So yeah, keep that please.
Dragon Claw too! Please god keep these
I think this game is a mixed bag when it comes to features and mechanics. Some things are so amazingly awesome that I hope they are kept for all eternity forward, while others are so atrociously bad that I hope they get removed from the series permanently and never come back. And some are in-between: good but not perfect, or bad but not terrible.
Let’s focus on the positive since that is what this thread is about. Here are my personal favorites from the features and mechanics in the game. Some of them have already been posted by others but I’m echoing them in that case.
- Being able to nickname your Pokémon directly at the party screen instead of at an idiotic “name rater”.
- The “linear open world” regional layout/design.
- Seamless battle transitions.
- A camera that can be freely rotated everywhere, even in battles!
- The way learning and changing moves work, being able to change (back) to any move as long as the Pokémon in question has learned it at some point.
- Being able to catch wild Pokémon without having to battle them first, but still having the option to battle them first if you want to.
- Being able to switch your lead Pokémon directly on the overworld instead of having to go to the menu first.
- Having a list of main quests and side quests.
- A time system that isn’t tied to the real time set on the console, and being able to change to several other times of day whenever you want (through resting).
- Picking up items on the overworld without a huge text box appearing every single time.
- In a similar vein, not seeing a huge text box when catching a Pokémon, just a small note that the Pokémon was caught.
- Getting trade evolutions without actually having to trade in order to evolve them.
- Being able to evolve a Pokémon whenever you want on the party screen once it has reached the criteria for evolving, as opposed to the Pokémon automatically evolving when is has reached the criteria.
There might be more but those are the biggest ones I can think of. I haven’t beaten the second part of the game yet so there might be more things I like that I just haven’t seen yet.
Let’s focus on the positive since that is what this thread is about. Here are my personal favorites from the features and mechanics in the game. Some of them have already been posted by others but I’m echoing them in that case.
- Being able to nickname your Pokémon directly at the party screen instead of at an idiotic “name rater”.
- The “linear open world” regional layout/design.
- Seamless battle transitions.
- A camera that can be freely rotated everywhere, even in battles!
- The way learning and changing moves work, being able to change (back) to any move as long as the Pokémon in question has learned it at some point.
- Being able to catch wild Pokémon without having to battle them first, but still having the option to battle them first if you want to.
- Being able to switch your lead Pokémon directly on the overworld instead of having to go to the menu first.
- Having a list of main quests and side quests.
- A time system that isn’t tied to the real time set on the console, and being able to change to several other times of day whenever you want (through resting).
- Picking up items on the overworld without a huge text box appearing every single time.
- In a similar vein, not seeing a huge text box when catching a Pokémon, just a small note that the Pokémon was caught.
- Getting trade evolutions without actually having to trade in order to evolve them.
- Being able to evolve a Pokémon whenever you want on the party screen once it has reached the criteria for evolving, as opposed to the Pokémon automatically evolving when is has reached the criteria.
There might be more but those are the biggest ones I can think of. I haven’t beaten the second part of the game yet so there might be more things I like that I just haven’t seen yet.
I'll just say: in/out battle transitions and level up prompts.
If you tried recently to go from Arceus to SwSh or BDSP, you'll feel that pain every time a random encounter (or even a triggered encounter in SwSh) happens, as well as with how long it takes to go through the experience gains + leveling up + potentially learning up new moves.
If you tried recently to go from Arceus to SwSh or BDSP, you'll feel that pain every time a random encounter (or even a triggered encounter in SwSh) happens, as well as with how long it takes to go through the experience gains + leveling up + potentially learning up new moves.
Having the battle system as secondary, or even as a punishment, is NOT something I'd dig. Then again, played Stadium before any of the main series, and grew up with Spyro, so this trend of "everything is open world" kinda rubs me wrong in series that didn't have it. I like Skyrim, I like Ocarina of Time, but, if I get a new Zelda, I don't want it to feel like Skyrim.
Pokemon shouldn't become Monster Hunter.
Pokemon shouldn't become Monster Hunter.
But 2 turn freeze if second frostbite. The same drowzy and sleep.
And some exceptions like status moves.
Well...what do you know. Gen 9 is coming in hot and a bit faster than expected. With the recent announcement its now very clear that Arceus and Gen 9 were developed simulataneously, and with such a short window after Arceus's launch there's no way they didnt make all these drastic changes for a one of game. Also of note is GF explictly stating gen 9 is going to be Open World for realz this time, so just like lets go was to swsh, arceus was a beta/testing ground for what we might see for the future of Pokemon. A lot more mechanics may be carried over from Arceus than we realized. With such a deadline approaching, now would be a good time to settle on what we like, love, and hate from this game and see if such features rear up again going forward.
SWSH didn't really carry much of anything from let's go, though.
Legends Arceus carried more from Let's Go!
- Portable PCs
- Overworld Pokemon
- Dex limit (whoopsies)
- Teleport mechanics.
- Candy was introduced (was changed to exp in swsh, reintroduced as grit in pla )
- A little cheating but Raids were from Go, which lets go is the in between of Go and Swsh.
- Nature Manipulation (changed to nature mints in swsh)
- Capture bonuses (increased pokemon spawns, brilliant aura pokemon, etc.
The list goes on but its all the little stuff I kept noticing that gets glossed over. I dont think theres ever been a game GF made where they dropped almoat everything and just made new stuff. They are conrinuously building on their previous works to spice up the QoL per entry.
See my thoughts drifted more towards the battle mechanics and after that I just went into a fugue state. I actually did forget about the candy (didn't Let's Go have EXP candies? was it really just pokemon candies?) and capture bonuses in general.
On the subject of QOL stuff they do show us fighting a Larvitar on what seems to be a normal dirt road so that aspect of LA is probably in, which is nice.
I wouldn't want to see too much change in battle mechanics, except maybe replacing freeze with frost bite. The problem is they might do an all or nothing with these new mechanics if they were to bring them in, and I don't like the idea of having increased evasion of fog in the game. [EDIT: turns out fog evasion isn't new to legends! please don't bring it back into a competitive game though]
I would definitely love to see the quality of life changes made to the menu (changing moves, evolution, names etc) and I would like to see the quest system brought into the main game. It just gives you something different to do rather than the same old beating all the gyms and becoming champion.
Also, no more grass encounters. Overworld encounters all the way!
I would definitely love to see the quality of life changes made to the menu (changing moves, evolution, names etc) and I would like to see the quest system brought into the main game. It just gives you something different to do rather than the same old beating all the gyms and becoming champion.
Also, no more grass encounters. Overworld encounters all the way!
Last edited:
Fog as a mechanic existed in DP to begin with; I doubt they would necessarily bring that in as part of carrying over LA mechanics
I think they only brought it back because it was in Sinnoh. I think it's really telling they left alone until the BDSP/LA combo considering Gen 5 & so forth literally had foggy valleys and mornings but no battle effect lol
If they choose to bring it back moving forward it is because they have chosen violence