Unpopular opinions

The Battle Chatelaines did the Battle Facility Head role right.

These four are often overlooked. They tend to be ignored or disliked for replacing the Battle Frontier heads in ORAS. Despite this, they have the most jacked up teams of any Battle Facility Head.

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Nita#Super_Single_Battle_.28on_50th_consecutive_battle.29
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Evelyn#Super_Double_Battle_.28on_50th_consecutive_battle.29
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Dana#Super_Triple_Battle_.28on_50th_consecutive_battle.29
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/...ation_Battle_.28on_50th_consecutive_battle.29

The Battle Chatelaines have insane teams stacked entirely with powerful legendaries each and show themselves to be really scary in battle. Many people don't like this because there's no context as to how they got these legendaries (tbf there's never context for how anyone in a battle facility got a legendary), but it shows how these four trainers are effective heads of their battle facility and can even be fun to face off against. Nita's team in particular is insane because she has three legendary genies with moves and items to cover up for their weaknesses. You have to actually strategize around finding a clear way to maneuver through them sometimes and can even easily lose if you get lucked out by Tornadus.

Battle Facilities are made to be challenging aspects of the Pokemon games. In each of these, the player builds themselves up to face off stronger and stronger trainers throughout their streak. Once the player reaches (28+ wins before Gen 6, 40+ wins in Gens 6-7), they are able to face off against higher level trainers with stronger Pokemon, including teams with lower tier legendaries. Battle Facility Heads are supposed to be leaders of these; the strongest of them all, but plenty of them have teams that just don't cut it.

Here are some examples:


lucy-gen3.png

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Lucy#Gold_Symbol_challenge

- Pike Queen Lucy is head of the Battle Pike, one of the seven facilities in the Emerald Battle Frontier. In her final match she leads off with a Seviper and a Steelix. Two Pokemon that are pretty subpar for how far you have to go, where other trainers on this level in challenges have Tyranitar, Dragonite, and Latios. I get the theme of the Battle Pike were supposed to be serpents, but I don't get the purpose of it if it just stunts what Pokemon the leader can use to an extent this significant.

ingo.png
emmet.png

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Emmet#On_49th_consecutive_battle
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Ingo#On_49th_consecutive_battle
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Emmet#On_49th_consecutive_battle_2

- Ingo and Emmet are leaders of the Battle Subway. While this is a good battle facility of its own, the heads could've had better Pokemon. If people are running stuff like Cresselia, Heatran, Salamence, Ferrothorn, and Garchomp before you reach them, plenty of regular trainers can have noticeably better teams than Ingo and Emmet before you reach them.

red-gen7.png

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/...ingle_Battle_.28on_50th_consecutive_battle.29

- Red is known as a Battle Legend but is a really awful offender of this same issue. I've had a 50 streak run where he ended up being easier than all 49 trainers it took to reach him because of how subpar his Pokemon were for a streak this high. His team is objectively worse than most if not all the previous 10 trainers you face off before him and could easily be the easiest match you battle in a 50 streak if you are that unfortunate. He holds the position of Battle Legend and Battle Tree head when he really should not.


On another note, the Battle Chatelaines have more real personality than any other Battle Facility Head I've ever seen. Nita is very rash and hasty, Evelyn is very shy, Dana is very sassy but is a little afraid of Morgan, Morgan is very careful and the most mature about the way she treats players. She is also the de-facto leader of the group.

Battle Facility Heads did not need to have as strong of personalities as they did and I didn't expect to see the Battle Chatelaines like this but it was a nice touch to have this in the games they were in.

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On another note the Battle Maison as a whole is overlooked. I used to overlook it for the longest time because it wasn't seen as great, but was forced to try it out because it was the only way to get Porygon-Z in Alpha Sapphire. I've discovered that, if I'm not going crazy, the Battle Maison seems to be like a Battle Frontier in one building.

The Platinum Battle Frontier was 5 different modes for the player to challenge themselves and get rewarded in, with each being in different buildings.

The Battle Maison was 5 different modes for the player to challenge themselves and get rewarded in, with each being in the same building.

The main difference is that instead of having them all required to be singles and singles with different sprinkles on top, each of these modes were more vastly different. One was singles, one was doubles, one was triples, one was rotational, and one was doubles but you had to work with someone else. Five entirely different playstyles the game tries to have you master as opposed to one.
 
Ransei said:
- Red is known as a Battle Legend but is a really awful offender of this same issue. I've had a 50 streak run where he ended up being easier than all 49 trainers it took to reach him because of how subpar his Pokemon were for a streak this high. His team is objectively worse than most if not all the previous 10 trainers you face off before him and could easily be the easiest match you battle in a 50 streak if you are that unfortunate. He holds the position of Battle Legend and Battle Tree head when he really should not.
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The classic problem of random gauntlets with fixed bosses.

You can prepare yourself for the boss you are guaranteed to encounter, but everything beforehand is a lot more risky, for they may suddenly carry exactly what counters your composition with no way to see it coming.

Like Diablo II's Uniques and Superuniques being a lot more dangerous than the Act Bosses.
 
Ransei said:
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This was a really excellent post and I agree with pretty much everything you said. I wanted to reply but I don't really know what to say because you summed it all up so perfectly. But I have some short thoughts on a few subjects.
Ransei said:
- Ingo and Emmet are leaders of the Battle Subway. While this is a good battle facility of its own, the heads could've had better Pokemon. If people are running stuff like Cresselia, Heatran, Salamence, Ferrothorn, and Garchomp before you reach them, plenty of regular trainers can have noticeably better teams than Ingo and Emmet before you reach them.
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I agree. I love the Subway and the challenge it presents, but Ingo and Emmet have pretty bad teams, sadly. They should have had better teams.
Ransei said:
On another note, the Battle Chatelaines have more real personality than any other Battle Facility Head I've ever seen. Nita is very rash and hasty, Evelyn is very shy, Dana is very sassy but is a little afraid of Morgan, Morgan is very careful and the most mature about the way she treats players. She is also the de-facto leader of the group.
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This is one thing I totally love. I am pretty sure the Chatelaines have the most personality out of any facility bosses in the games. In comparison, I have recently realized that many other facility bosses are a bit lacking in this aspect. Back when I played Emerald when it was new, I remember thinking that the Frontier Brains were great characters with a lot of personality. But now that I look back, I think I just glorified them in my head because of the challenge they presented. They aren't as bad as some of the really flat characters in the series (like the Gym Leaders in Gen 1), but they are still far from the greatness of the Chatelaines.
Ransei said:
- Red is known as a Battle Legend but is a really awful offender of this same issue. I've had a 50 streak run where he ended up being easier than all 49 trainers it took to reach him because of how subpar his Pokemon were for a streak this high. His team is objectively worse than most if not all the previous 10 trainers you face off before him and could easily be the easiest match you battle in a 50 streak if you are that unfortunate. He holds the position of Battle Legend and Battle Tree head when he really should not.
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Personally, I have had mixed experiences with battling Red. I have lost against him once, but I have won against him all other times I faced him. I think one thing that can make him difficult is his Charizard. Since it can Mega Evolve into either X or Y (or not Mega Evolve at all if he Megas another Pokémon), it is a bit unpredictable. But I guess he suffers from the same fate as other bosses; he is easy since you know what he runs (or at least what he can run) before the battle starts, making it predictable to an extent.
Ransei said:
On another note the Battle Maison as a whole is overlooked. I used to overlook it for the longest time because it wasn't seen as great, but was forced to try it out because it was the only way to get Porygon-Z in Alpha Sapphire. I've discovered that, if I'm not going crazy, the Battle Maison seems to be like a Battle Frontier in one building.
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Yeah. As a Facility player, it makes me very happy to see people show some appreciation for the Maison. It was quite popular during the Gen 6 days as evidenced by our Maison thread here on the forums. It has the most replies of all the threads in the Battle Facilities forum and I remember using it a lot for inspiration when I battled at the Maison.

"No Battle Frontier" has become a negative tagline for OR/AS, sadly. It is a shame people don't see the greatness of the Maison. Personally, I used to be in the same boat. At first, I was unhappy about OR/AS not having the Battle Frontier. But after playing OR/AS, I found that the Maison was enough. Playing through it again, using some of the new Megas and some different strategies compared to what I used in X/Y... it was honestly fun enough. Nowadays, I think I enjoyed the Maison more than the Emerald Frontier. Now that's an unpopular opinion! Anyway, the Maison is one of my three favorites from the standard Battle Facilities. The Subway and the Tree are the other two. All three are great but in somewhat different ways.

And whenever this discussion is brought up, there's one thing I'm always wondering about. I often see people complain about the Frontier missing from OR/AS. But I wonder how many of those actually battled in the Emerald Frontier, and how many of them would have battled in the Frontier if it had been brought back in OR/AS? How many of them are Facility players to begin with? Did they even try the Maison in OR/AS (or X/Y, for that matter) or did they decide to miss out on all the fun it has to offer? It would be fun to do a study about this subject but I really don't have the time for that, or any idea of how to do it in a good way.
 
Suspicious Derivative said:
And whenever this discussion is brought up, there's one thing I'm always wondering about. I often see people complain about the Frontier missing from OR/AS. But I wonder how many of those actually battled in the Emerald Frontier, and how many of them would have battled in the Frontier if it had been brought back in OR/AS? How many of them are Facility players to begin with? Did they even try the Maison in OR/AS (or X/Y, for that matter) or did they decide to miss out on all the fun it has to offer? It would be fun to do a study about this subject but I really don't have the time for that, or any idea of how to do it in a good way.
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My interpretation is not that they are mad at the absence of the Battle Frontier (maybe disappointed but not really annoyed), but the fact it was teased, giving a feeling of "we could have added it, but we didn't want to".
 
Suspicious Derivative said:
And whenever this discussion is brought up, there's one thing I'm always wondering about. I often see people complain about the Frontier missing from OR/AS. But I wonder how many of those actually battled in the Emerald Frontier, and how many of them would have battled in the Frontier if it had been brought back in OR/AS? How many of them are Facility players to begin with? Did they even try the Maison in OR/AS (or X/Y, for that matter) or did they decide to miss out on all the fun it has to offer? It would be fun to do a study about this subject but I really don't have the time for that, or any idea of how to do it in a good way.
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As someone who's put a lot of time into both, the Maison does have its merits. However, a lack of nonstandard formats, which the Emerald Frontier had a lot of, is an easy to notice area where it can be improved. So the Maison doesn't necessarily lose out to the Emerald Frontier as is, but definitely loses out to the ideal of what an ORAS Frontier could have been. I'm still waiting for the chance to use Power-up Punch in the Arena.
 
As fine as the Maison was, it was, as I remember, a direct port from the XY Maison, not even bothering to reskin it so it didn't look out of place (the RSE tower, for instance, still looks pretty nice). That was one of the reasons it fell flat for me. The Battle Frontier was really great, and going through those facilities again with new pokemon and mechanics was a huge potential draw for me. However, I would have been just as happy if they replaced it with something new and equally fun. Since I wasn't getting functionality I didn't already have, it didn't feel like a new addition. And even then, when I did spend time in the maison, I was not impressed with the experience. The quality of life improvements in the Gen 5 subway and the opponent pokemon set improvements of the BDSP tower gave me enough reason to come back in those cases. As I remember, gen 6 had not updated their sets sufficiently to account for the improved power the player had access to through mega evolutions and more access to hidden abilities, and it was stale.
 
Ransei said:
The Platinum Battle Frontier was 5 different modes for the player to challenge themselves and get rewarded in, with each being in different buildings.

The Battle Maison was 5 different modes for the player to challenge themselves and get rewarded in, with each being in the same building.

The main difference is that instead of having them all required to be singles and singles with different sprinkles on top, each of these modes were more vastly different. One was singles, one was doubles, one was triples, one was rotational, and one was doubles but you had to work with someone else. Five entirely different playstyles the game tries to have you master as opposed to one.
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I agree with pretty much everything else in your post, but you can challenge any of the Platinum facilities in Doubles and the Tower also has Multi battles. Like, sure, you only face the Frontier Brains in the Single Battle formats, but I don't think that's a huge loss. Facing the boss trainers is great the first time around and they act as a good marker for your overall progress, but once you've beaten them once or twice they're actually the least interesting part of the challenge because of their predictability.

Some of the Gen 4 facilities change in pretty substantial ways when you face them in Doubles. The Factory becomes even more focused on crazy hyper-offence and any synergy you can achieve is super precious. The Hall requires two Pokemon of the same species, which creates some really interesting strategic potential. The Tower Multi Battles trade pretty evenly with the Maison's Multi Battles imo: the default Maison partners have static teams compared with the stat trainers' more varied options, but the Maison has boss battles.

So yeah I guess my point is that I don't think it's fair to say they both have 5 battle modes.
 
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The Battle Maison is a cool facility for Kalos, but ORAS didn't have its own Battle Maison to replace the Battle Frontier, it just had the XY one again. The major bitterness there seems to stem from laziness being reflected in its implementation.

Also I'm gonna say outright: The different battle formats (Single, Double, etc.) don't count as differences on the same order as the Facility mechanics in Emerald or Platinum which fundamentally change what type of Pokemon you favor even within the same format (i.e. a Singles team for the Battle Pyramid will not necessarily work as well in the Battle Arena or Battle Castle). The Maison has the former, not the latter approach, and frankly I'm not giving it credit for including the Triples and Rotation formats over games where those formats didn't exist (and as a bias, I think the 3-Battler formats are garbage).

Here's where my unpopular opinions come in: The Chatelaines have about as much character as a generic trope character for any random anime or manga strip, which is more than your average Gym Leader or Elite Four but still not on a level that earns them any major points, especially since the majority of players who are going to see them and read those lines are going to be inherently narrower since GF seemingly cut down on Battle Facilities because they found people willing to engage with them was minimal. Not helping matters is that they're basically designed as a set even visually, so there's not much inclination to use them separately or elsewhere other than as generic pretty characters. You cannot look at the Facility Leaders and tell me any of them could be mixed up with each other or assumed to be a collective (any more than they would be with the Gym Leaders vs the other Facilities at least).

On top of this, the characterization of the Chatelaines means jack to me in a conversation about the facilities. I play the Post-Game facilities for Battle Variety and shake-up, if I want characterization then put that effort into characters being included in Post-game cutscene scenarios like Looker or the N Rematches or Yancy or Stark Mountain Buck or... Giving a smattering of character to the Facility heads doesn't do much if the facility isn't interesting enough for me to want to bother with it after I beat the game. If I want to see Anime Waifus, I'll open an Image Board or something, not fight through a bunch of cheating Pokemon AI trainers. Don't use character writing that's 10 years late and a few levels flat to convince me you didn't get lazy and make a boring Post-Game facility that you copy-pasted into a region because you couldn't even be bothered to make an appropriate visual skin (the Maison is functionally the Battle Tower already, why not use the Tower in the Region that already had the Tower?)
 
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pika pal said:
The Battle Maison is a cool facility for Kalos, but ORAS didn't have its own Battle Maison to replace the Battle Frontier, it just had the XY one again. The major bitterness there seems to stem from laziness being reflected in its implementation.
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pika pal said:
make a boring Post-Game facility that you copy-pasted into a region because you couldn't even be bothered to make an appropriate visual skin (the Maison is functionally the Battle Tower already, why not use the Tower in the Region that already had the Tower?)
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I feel like the issue is yes, ORAS straight up copy-pasted XY's Maison into the Battle Resort, but the issue is more the comparative basis from the preceding original games that ORAS stems from. Namely Emerald. Emerald is famous for having a full blown post-game area with seven different battle facilities, so ORAS only having the Battle Maison, while a pretty great facility in and of itself in my eyes, and the fact that it was doing an exact copy-paste of XY's Maison, feels pale in comparison to many when Emerald had something that was grander in scale comparatively.

The thing is that this isn't actually the first time they just straight up copy-pasted a battle facility from the preceding game, with no changes in visuals, and called it a day. The remake that preceded ORAS, HGSS, actually did the exact same thing with Platinum's Battle Frontier. The Frontier in HGSS was a straight up copypaste from Platinum, with no visual changes whatsoever, and everything from the Frontier Brains themselves and whatnot, was kept completely identical to the Platinum Frontier. The difference is that when you compare HGSS to the games it originated from, GSC, the fact that HGSS also did the bare minimum in copypasting from the preceding Gen 4 game doesn't stand out quite as much because the originating games had less comparatively. Why? Because Gold and Silver didn't have a Battle facility, and the most Crystal had was a mere Battle Tower, and Platinum's Battle Frontier just happened to be better comparatively to that. So the copypaste job in HGSS is less noticeable, or at least there was less reason to be bitter about that.

Both remakes (HGSS and ORAS) in terms of battle facilities did a straight up copypaste job of the preceding game's battle facility grounds, with no adjustments to the visual skins whatsoever (frankly, the Sinnoh Frontier existing in both Sinnoh and Johto at the same time with the same facility heads really makes no sense especially when DPP and HGSS are implied to be concurrent in timeline). But the difference is more the preceding comparative basis from the games each remake originated from that we have as comparative basis. HGSS happened to have it better because the facility it had that it could copypaste from just happened to be better than the facility the originating game, Crystal: a five-facility Frontier is better than a mere Crystal Battle Tower, so it had a happy accident there. ORAS meanwhile stands out more in its copypaste job because the Maison is being compared to Emerald Battle Frontier, which a one-building Maison doesn't stand out to the extent of, and so the fact that it also did a CP of XY's Maison in the vein of HGSS CP of Platinum's Frontier stands out a lot more when compared to what Hoenn had before.

The kind of situation you're outlining happened twice, with ORAS being the second time. HGSS was just a happy accident for the reasons I outlined. It's a glaring issue of Pokemon's tendency to bend development time to merchandise schedules and push out games on a yearly deadline: especially in these cases as HGSS and ORAS came out merely one year after Platinum and XY, respectively, and it shows. HGSS just happened to be lucky, ORAS less so.
 
I spy with my little eye, a group of Pokémon fans talking about battle facilities. Oh, boy. This is gonna be good.

So, the Battle Frontier. It's a cool enough place, I guess. Most of the games don't have one, and it helps Emerald, Platinum, and HGSS all stick out amongst the crowd a bit more. So what's the problem here? Well, this wouldn't be the "unpopular opinions" thread without some flaming hot takes, so here's one to chew on. ahem

Not only do I think Gen 4 and especially Pokémon Emerald to be hard-carried by the Frontier's implementation, but I also believe the Frontier as a whole to be a flawed, if not outright bad case of jRPG game design.

Let's take a look at what these facilities have in store for players. There's usually a Battle Tower... which every single region also has its own version of somewhere. There's the Battle Factory, which randomizes Pokémon for the player... there's the Pyramid in Emerald's iteration which plays unique, I guess, but even that bears striking similarities at points to Black & White 2's version-exclusive tower/forest facility, and at least there you can actually keep the experience points you gain. Most of the other facilities I can't even remember the names of because they're just that forgettable. People say they like the Frontier, but at the end of the day, there's nothing either version of it offers that the player can't try and re-create and/or find elsewhere across the main series. The things that are exclusive to the Frontier, on the other hand, have a tendency of promoting luck over player skill and training etiquette to an almost unhealthy degree. Heck, the Battle Arena can be argued to be a form of battling and gambling simultaneously, and we already know how they felt about the Game Corner.

The game that really got everyone fired up about this was Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire. It was bad enough that the developers teased us at the Battle Resort, but certainly, after being in both the original Hoenn games (Emerald) and a remake (HGSS), certainly ORAS, a Hoenn remake, would also have the Frontier. We all know how the story ends, but despite this, my personal enjoyment of ORAS wasn't decreased. In fact, I'd actually say the Frontier being removed in ORAS was a good thing, because at least then the developers had to ask themselves "what can we offer to the player as compensation for its absense?" ORAS may not have a Battle Frontier, but that's one very small nitpick that in my eyes, opens up room for a much more complete and fresh version of Hoenn overall with new additions such as Soaring, the DexNav, and new Mega Evolutions, the latter of which I also hate in multiplayer but enjoy in single player.
 
bdt2002 said:
but even that bears striking similarities at points to Black & White 2's version-exclusive tower/forest facility, and at least there you can actually keep the experience points you gain.
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I'm really struggling to figure out how this is an important distinction. The facilities are designed to test the player's teams after they have already been optimized. By the time you are seriously working on a facility, there's effectively nothing left that Exp on your main team is useful for.
 
The EXP and Money part of Black Tower/White Treehollow is irrelevant to the topic of facilities, and they differ in other ways that weigh significantly on the format compared to to the Battle Pyramid.

First and foremost your team's levels aren't regulated with the Mons as they are in Battle facilities, so outleveling most of the challenge is entirely an option even on Challenge mode, which can neuter the Gauntlet structure when you can brute force through opponents without suffering any attrition to recover from. While locked out of regular item usage, you have the ability to move held items around your team between battles, allowing you to bring resources from the outside for the Gauntlet like Choice items to facilitate mowing down opponents or Leftovers/Berries to heal Chip damage, whereas the Battle Pyramid locks you out of even those with the Pyramid specific bag. Tower/Tree allow Shift Battle style, Facilities never do, yet another mark in the player's favor for what is supposed to be a limited resource endurance set up. Pyramid has Wild Pokemon to contend with and no guarantee of healing resources like the Doctor trainer. Finally, the Pyramid limits you to 3 Pokemon vs bringing your full team of 6 for BW TreeTower, doubling your number of bodies for the challenge.

Frankly the resemblance between the two facilities is superficial at best on the front of "move around a non-straightforward environment without free resource access", but the Battle Pyramid is structured to limit and drain your resources while discouraging brute force attempts due to a combination of those limits and the level curve. Frankly I never even thought of the B2W2 areas as Facility stand-ins like I did the Subway or PWT, because they make so many concessions that the Facilities have limited since they debuted with the Gen 2 tower as to undercut the difficulty factor those mechanics were implemented for.
 
Battle Facilities are the only reason to play single-player Pokemon post-GSC.
bdt2002 said:
People say they like the Frontier, but at the end of the day, there's nothing either version of it offers that the player can't try and re-create and/or find elsewhere across the main series. The things that are exclusive to the Frontier, on the other hand, have a tendency of promoting luck over player skill and training etiquette to an almost unhealthy degree.
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???

How exactly would I recreate the Factory, the Arena, the Palace, the Dome, the Pike, the Hall in USUM? People largely weren't even willing to recreate the Battle Tower using the Gen8 Battle Tower (which doesn't have streaks anymore), which was at least thinkable.

The Frontier isn't luck over skill. If anything, the Tower is, because the win rates of teams winning 3000 in a row are so indistinguishable that luck makes the main difference between reaching 1500 and 3000.
Heck, the Battle Arena can be argued to be a form of battling and gambling simultaneously, and we already know how they felt about the Game Corner.
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There are established Arena strategies that allow you to beat Greta Gold with NUs. (I only got to 45 or so personally, but I didn't use the best team.) It's far from the most luck-based facility (that would be the Factory).
 
misterdarvus said:
Also, GF did less with Battle Facilities lately, because Online PvP is even more prevalent now. And lets say it will replace offline battle facilities
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They could make the Battle Facilities PvP. They'd have to get creative with some of them, like I'd imagine Gen III's Pike and Pyramid would be more of a race thing, but I think most could easily be made into a multiplayer competition.
 
Always hard to tell what's an Unpopular opinion (at least beyond simply not being a 50%+ Majority) or a topic that hasn't been covered in the past by myself or someone else. That said to share one, I'm finding I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of recent Pokemon designs in the context of being monster/creature designs, even if I do like the designs themselves standalone.

The best way I can put it is that a lot of the "populous" speeches, like ones you know exist in a significant population rather than being very rare or specific entities like Legendaries, are starting to feel a bit too "distinct" if that makes any sense? Like I look at some Pokemon designs such as Incineroar, Decidueye, or Cinderace and I don't think of them as a member of a species. They feel like a singular monster that would be a Party member or an NPC in another RPG, where they at most have small distinguishing traits in case you meet other members of their race to compare (like Kimahri and the Ronso in Final Fantasy X). I think this can work to an extent with the Legendaries or Pokemon who simply don't occur frequently enough in the wild, such as Dusknoir style trade evolutions or things like the Birds/Beasts/Golems, but for the Starters or certain wild species who as a premise there must exist several of, something about that design approach doesn't quite jive in my brain.

Admittedly this is a tricky line to walk since the most I can lay this on is a vibe and maybe the level of detail in each Mon, and this isn't really objective as an issue anyway, but it's something I keep finding myself saying when I wonder why some new designs aren't clicking with me like the older ones could. This also might come from a bit of bias because I have to acknowledge that this was something some games actively employed with the Pokemon, perhaps most notably the Mystery Dungeon series, which walks an even murkier line between the Pokemon as random creatures/species and as highly individualized beings under systems that don't tend to include nicknaming for most of them
 
pika pal said:
Always hard to tell what's an Unpopular opinion (at least beyond simply not being a 50%+ Majority) or a topic that hasn't been covered in the past by myself or someone else. That said to share one, I'm finding I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of recent Pokemon designs in the context of being monster/creature designs, even if I do like the designs themselves standalone.

The best way I can put it is that a lot of the "populous" speeches, like ones you know exist in a significant population rather than being very rare or specific entities like Legendaries, are starting to feel a bit too "distinct" if that makes any sense? Like I look at some Pokemon designs such as Incineroar, Decidueye, or Cinderace and I don't think of them as a member of a species. They feel like a singular monster that would be a Party member or an NPC in another RPG, where they at most have small distinguishing traits in case you meet other members of their race to compare (like Kimahri and the Ronso in Final Fantasy X). I think this can work to an extent with the Legendaries or Pokemon who simply don't occur frequently enough in the wild, such as Dusknoir style trade evolutions or things like the Birds/Beasts/Golems, but for the Starters or certain wild species who as a premise there must exist several of, something about that design approach doesn't quite jive in my brain.

Admittedly this is a tricky line to walk since the most I can lay this on is a vibe and maybe the level of detail in each Mon, and this isn't really objective as an issue anyway, but it's something I keep finding myself saying when I wonder why some new designs aren't clicking with me like the older ones could. This also might come from a bit of bias because I have to acknowledge that this was something some games actively employed with the Pokemon, perhaps most notably the Mystery Dungeon series, which walks an even murkier line between the Pokemon as random creatures/species and as highly individualized beings under systems that don't tend to include nicknaming for most of them
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Yes, this! Absolutely this! Inteleon and Cinderace are another pair that don't look like a plausible member of a species, they're just so humanoid.

Slightly tangential, but I think it has to do with how hard GF is going on "personality" Pokemon in recent generations. This didn't used to be so much of a thing; Togepi, for instance, is a cute fairy type but there are different Togepi out there: Misty's Togepi is friendly and curious while Dawn's Togekiss is refined and fussy, and we see another Togepi in the anime that's mean and mischievous. Gold's Togepi in the manga is a naughty delinquent.

But all Sobble are timid and cowardly, because that's a characteristic of the species. There are apparently no brave, bullish, or boisterous Sobble. I think this filters through to the design; they're designed with certain emotions or characters built in, and that makes them look less like a generic animal. Just my interpretation.
 
It seems like half of Gen 2's Pokémon only exist to look cute in the background of the anime. I swear Sentret and Stantler appear in one shot of Giratina and the Sky Warrior even though they weren't found in any Sinnoh game at the time.

Also, a lot of ArtTubers (or at least Jack from Subjectively and Truegreen7) say that personality is an important part of a Pokémon's design, so it's interesting to see people disagree. A criticism a lot of people have about Temtem is that they look "soulless", but they have a lot of life in the animated trailer, so I'm wondering if it's just because these people have only seen the idle animations.
 
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To me, a greater emphasis on fixed personalities for the starters feels like the devs think they've put themselves in a corner. They want something that's both clearly distinct from previous starters while still being mechanically simple early-game and based on a well-known animal. So they rely on a set personality/class to distinguish e.g. Rillaboom from Infernape. Personally, I'd prefer they were a little more lax with "based on a well-known animal." Bulbasaur and Mudkip are both well-loved despite not having that quality, but there hasn't been much of an attempt since.

I guess I might as well continue with the rant thinking about this drove me to. Focusing on real-world locations is actively holding the games back from having better mon and map designs. For mons, I think of the basic animals as the least interesting designs, and so think that replacing them with more alien designs would be more interesting. When making a game off a current real-world area, there's an expectation of finding similar fauna as said real area, which (at least for the fauna most people are aware of) usually has pretty noticeable overlap with the boring designs.

For a mapping example, consider the persistent problem of the Ice area being late. For it to be earlier, it needs to be nearby the starting area. The starting area needs to have a large number of towns close together because shorter routes are part of the difficulty curve. In reality, the places next to the tundra or mountaintops are less inhabited than plains and coasts the cowards. So a region that follows a real location will have the Ice area far from the starting area, inherently making it later in the game.
 
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