Unpopular opinions

Ironmage said:
It occurred to me that USUM was sort of the last opportunity for Rainbow Rocket's concept to have worked. Gen 7 is when the series began to transition away from supervillain plots for its evil Teams with Team Skull, though Aether Foundation carried itself as a second Team (I always figured that Aether not being directly slotted in was because it was already shown off in the main plot). Teams Yell and Star are beneath the likes of Galactic and Plasma. Trying to skip the Teams of new gens in favour of the person driving the plot of the legendaries still feels like it would be clunky: why would a Rose that successfully contained Eternatus be doing outright villainy? Gen 8/9 also have much less emphasis on parallel worlds as a part of the setting than gens 5-7, so 'antagonists from timelines where they won' would more jarring to suddenly introduce.
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On the parallel worlds concept, 5 doesn't really bring it up beyond the meta tie-in for stuff like the Entralink or Old-Save bonuses, it's mainly 6 and 7 where it's raised (and in 6 it's technically conjecture that never gets any chance to be verified because of Zinnia). 7 is the only game where Other worlds are a significant concept in the plot, though 8 still has the Wormholes implicitly because of the Ultra Beasts appearing in the Max Lair. USUM was less the "last" opportunity for them to do Rainbow Rocket as it was written, rather it was the only time in the first place where it would make sense to attempt.

As far as the "person driving the plot" issue, that really only applies to Rose in Gen 8 (and this is assuming they were to use him and not someone like Swordward and Shielbert with either the cover Legendaries or Eternatus due to their Dynamax shenanigans). The Gen 9 Professor would probably fit right in with the other Team Bosses, given their blatant disregard for people or a facet of the Ecosystem isn't very far removed from Magma/Aqua or Ghetsis/SM Lusamine (which I'd expect to be the depiction they'd go with hypothetically given they used Vanilla Maxie/Archie AND that Lusamine being more overtly a villain in Pokemon depiction). Pokemon's not exactly moving away from plots where the ultimate antagonist can be given 1 or 2 faces, Rose was just a bizarre case compared to the outright criminals in previous stories (and this assuming they don't finagle a reason anyway like The Darkest Day ruining Galar to drive Rose out of his world).
 
Pikachu315111 said:
Maybe, they also notably dialed down the "subtle sexualized" tones the original game had at points:

  • During the Water Trial, instead of Lana imagining its a hunky male swimmer that needs help, she just says it sounds like a Pokemon needs help.
  • During the Grass Trial, instead of the minigame where you're mashing the ingredients together into a goop to a view of Mallow's crotch, she just puts it all in a boiling pot.
  • Instead of Lillie going with you to Exeggutor Island to fetch the other flute, only the player is allowed to go (and post game the cave scene between Lillie & the player in SM is replaced with a similar joke scene but it's with the boat captain).

I can see parents complaining about the mature content the game had "hidden" in it and so in USUM decided to dial it back.
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Ok I can see 1 and mayyyyybe 2 but how is 3 even remotely sexualized?

the Perfume Palace fireworks in gen 6 are more "subtly sexualized" than anything that happens in Executor Island

heck so is the entirety of Zinnia's interactions with the player in ORAS
(which is to say, not even Freud would consider any of these examples sexual at all)
 
Currently replaying BW2 for the first time in many years, and in the process among many other thoughts I have come to think that its rendition of the Team Plasma grunt theme is legitimately too good. Distractingly so. Consider the fact that the first time you hear this famously awesome jam is as accompaniment to a battle against a singular Level 14 Patrat. And sure, the Pokemon selection steadily improves as you progress further, but you never really quite get an encounter that lives up to how dynamic and intense the music is.
 
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Rapti said:
Ok I can see 1 and mayyyyybe 2 but how is 3 even remotely sexualized?
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Maybe not sexualized but I felt it was flirtatious.

Yung Dramps said:
Currently replaying BW2 for the first time in many years, and in the process among many other thoughts I have come to think that its rendition of the Team Plasma grunt theme is legitimately too good. Distractingly so. Consider the fact that the first time you hear this famously awesome jam is as accompaniment to a battle against a singular Level 14 Patrat. And sure, the Pokemon selection steadily improves as you progress further, but you never really quite get an encounter that lives up to how dynamic and intense the music is.
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The true victim of this is the Team Star Grunt them.
The song goes on for about 2:10 minutes before it loops, going through several instrumental segments... not that you'll know as the longest battle of the trainers who use this theme has 2 Pokemon, with most grunts only having one. It takes about 30 seconds to defeat one grunt and if they have you battle a second one they restart the theme so not like you're going to hear the rest unless you don't select a Move.
 
Pikachu315111 said:
The song goes on for about 2:10 minutes before it loops, going through several instrumental segments... not that you'll know as the longest battle of the trainers who use this theme has 2 Pokemon, with most grunts only having one. It takes about 30 seconds to defeat one grunt and if they have you battle a second one they restart the theme so not like you're going to hear the rest unless you don't select a Move.
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I'm always amazed by how many good bangers SV has.

The game gets a lot of trashing for the performance issues, but man the BGM absolutely bangs. I will fight over the Team Star boss theme (and Cassiopeia's )and pretty much all the Area Zero themes.

I swear i wasn't basically crying during the final Area Zero battle between how much of a banger the theme is and the plot enfolding there. Send help.
 
Ironmage said:
Gen 7 is when the series began to transition away from supervillain plots for its evil Teams with Team Skull, though Aether Foundation carried itself as a second Team (I always figured that Aether not being directly slotted in was because it was already shown off in the main plot).
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They never really stopped making the supervillain plots, they just switched to making the evil teams secondary in Gen 8. Yes, Team Yell isn't really evil, but SwSh also had Macro Cosmos. Sure, it was a stupid plot, but the evil team was there. Gen 9 had the whole Area Zero plot, and while it wasn't exactly a 'team', The Paradox pokemon/ Paradise Protection Protocol kinda filled that role.
 
Ransei said:
Every "third legendary" of a box art trio got half-assed in their games prior to Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. ORAS Delta Episode was the sole exception. Giratina was done much better in the Gen 8 games than in Platinum.
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Can you go into any more detail here? i.e What was half assed about them?
 
Sword/Shield and Scarlet/Violet are probably worse games on an objective level, but Sun and Moon were the least fun I've ever had with a Pokémon game. The sheer amount of pointless cutscenes that interupt you every minute makes the game border on unplayable to me, and USUM didn't fix this problem so I never played it. Also, I don't know how they fucked up online play in that game so badly when they had gotten it nearly perfectly the previous generation.
 
Sultan said:
Sword/Shield and Scarlet/Violet are probably worse games on an objective level, but Sun and Moon were the least fun I've ever had with a Pokémon game. The sheer amount of pointless cutscenes that interupt you every minute makes the game border on unplayable to me, and USUM didn't fix this problem so I never played it. Also, I don't know how they fucked up online play in that game so badly when they had gotten it nearly perfectly the previous generation.
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My issue with them is that they lack Quality of Life features that were plaguing games literally 20 years before (or had been fixed by them depending on the Developer you're looking at). The cutscenes themselves have very flat direction, the character faces have been memed, the lack of voice acting feels very jarring when the framing and direction really feel like they were made with it in mind (Zelda had this issue for a few entries), and of course the fact that the cutscenes are unskippable (FFX, one of the definitive RPG's of the PS2 era, had this particular issue even in re-releases, yet Kingdom Hearts around 1 year after did not).
 
Coronis said:
Can you go into any more detail here? i.e What was half assed about them?
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All Rayquaza did in Emerald's plot was fly towards Sootopolis, roar, then leave. Its only other involvement included you trying to summon Rayquaza, to catch Rayquaza, and from a call from May saying she found a green dragon flying about towards Route 131.

Giratina was just shoehorned into the same climax as DP to save the day, with no real build-up, backstory, or explanation behind it until 13 years later with Legends Arceus. Unlike with Legends Arceus, Giratina's lore barely even got fleshed out or explored in Platinum. All we did was enter its home and catch it after it randomly swooped in.

Kyurem, instead of being expanded upon with valuable info over what exactly it had to do with the Original Dragon, and maybe either completing the story of it or explaining why the Original Dragon cannot return, was just used as a plot device to promote the direction of Team Plasma being terrorists. Team Plasma used it as a weapon, and collected a device they found that could have a Kyurem fuse with Reshiram/Zekrom. In the end, Drayden was left to speculate that Kyurem could be the shell of the Original Dragon, but was still unsure. Juniper speculates that if Kyurem was the shell, then whatever fell into Giant Chasm must've been a Dragon Stone, which doesn't make any sense. B2W2 fails to explain on the story of the Original Dragon or flesh out on Kyurem very much, leaving it to be one of the most misunderstood Pokemon ever.

(Reaching off topic but Xerneas/Yveltal were similar to Kyurem except they were used as the fuel to a weapon rather than the weapon themselves, however, they also had significant tie-ins with said weapon in the lore, as the weapon carried some of the main traits of both Xerneas and Yveltal to cause a cataclysmic event in the past. The Ultimate Weapon drained the life of many surrounding Pokemon (Yveltal's normal job), then bestowed a new eternal life to Eternal Floette (Xerneas's capabilites). The remaining energy was left to eject from the weapon, end the Kalosian war, and incidentally create Mega Evolution. Xerneas/Yveltal's energy was the primary fuel for the ultimate weapon as it needed Pokemon life energy to work the first time, and the two are Pokemon life energy at its essence. Unlike with Xerneas/Yveltal, Kyurem's case had nothing to do with its lore. It was just, "it's a powerful ice-type attacker. we can use it to freeze the world")

Zygarde was scattered around Alola to monitor its ecosystem but we've never seen it take any action of its own in the games aside from that, unless we force it to through pure gameplay.

Pokemon Emerald wasn't about Rayquaza. It was about Archie and Maxie aiming to accomplish their goals with Kyogre and Groudon. Rayquaza just swooped by, resolved the climax, and left. The Delta Episode really put a lot more emphasis on Rayquaza.

Pokemon Platinum wasn't about Giratina, but should have been, considering Giratina's interesting backstory about being banned to Distortion World for its own violence. Legends Arceus did this.

Pokemon Black 2 White 2 was not about Kyurem or anything to do with its lore. It was just about Team Plasma striking back as terrorists. Kyurem was just tacked on there because it needed something to do for its game.

Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon were about Necrozma. Necrozma was the main thing going on with the games and your goal was to work around it.
 
pika pal said:
(FFX, one of the definitive RPG's of the PS2 era, had this particular issue even in re-releases, yet Kingdom Hearts around 1 year after did not).
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iirc the original release of the first Kingdom Hearts only lets you skip cutscenes under specific circumstances. I think you have to die to a boss then go rematch them, at which point you can skip the cutscene before the fight. Really bizarre. The ability to skip most cutscenes with no strings attached was only added in the HD version, and even then there's one that you can't skip for some reason. (It's affectionately known as the Unskippable Cutscene That Cannot Be Skipped Because It Is Unskippable.)

But then Kingdom Hearts II (another one of the definitive RPGs of the PS2 era) added a cutscene skip option that is accessed by pausing, so my point is kind of moot lol.
 
Karxrida said:
iirc the original release of the first Kingdom Hearts only lets you skip cutscenes under specific circumstances. I think you have to die to a boss then go rematch them, at which point you can skip the cutscene before the fight. Really bizarre. The ability to skip most cutscenes with no strings attached was only added in the HD version, and even then there's one that you can't skip for some reason. (It's affectionately known as the Unskippable Cutscene That Cannot Be Skipped Because It Is Unskippable.)

But then Kingdom Hearts II (another one of the definitive RPGs of the PS2 era) added a cutscene skip option that is accessed by pausing, so my point is kind of moot lol.
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Circumstantial skips are at least more than games from literally 15 years later are allowing for some reason.

Honestly the pacing and bad QoL is why I can't replay Gen 7 and gave up on Gen 8 in particular, and I got through Gen 6 without even thinking about it and started with Gen 3 and first-iteration Gen 4.

A kid who put up with what this derives from somehow found Gen 7 too slow to work through
 
First of all, Comparing SV (a 20 million dollar game) to TotK (a likely >120 million dollar game) isn’t fair, secondly, your switch has performance issues. Sound like your machine has a skill issue to me. Also
AB0C40AC-B38A-4AA8-B6C6-71747196CAF1.jpeg

Do you see my point?
 
Hazardous Scyther said:
Time to bring facts:
- Blue / Gary is the perfect representation of a rival in the anime or the games.
- Snorlax is the worst pokemon ever created, a fat fuck that has no point in existing
- Gardevoir line is very overrated
- Misreavus / Mismagius and Murkrow And Honchcrow are very very underrated pokemon
- Sword and Shield / Pokemon Platinum / HGSS / Pokemon Crystal are the best games
- Pokemon Should have created special shiny pokemon, Like shiny pokemon that are absolutley FIRE
- Pokemon Should be Able to lose moves on level up (ex: Anhhiliape loses final gambit on level up) and that move is replaced by a TM of the same type
- TR's are bad
- All pokemon that are good... are UGLY (ex: Gholdengo , Amoongus etc...)
- GEN 5 sprites are better than all 3D... YES IM LOOKING AT YOU TYPHOLOSION
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Sir, this is a scarlet and Violet thread, not a general thread. If the mods don’t remind you of that soon.

R
Edit, I thought I was in sv unpop opinions damnit
 
milotic is ugly, and i genuinely cant fathom how anyone could think otherwise
i understand why people dislike usum, but necrozma is badass. i would sacrifice all remakes, remasters, and b2w2 just for ultra necrozmas theme. throw in the pokemon itself, and i might add in legends arceus.
and finally,

if one more person complains about how buggy sv is, i will commit a crime of an unspecified but non-insignificant scale. game freak has to pump out a new pokemon game every three years, otherwise no new pokemon come out. that means the anime stops, the merch stops, to some extent the card game stops, and all sources of income for gamefreak are halted until new pokemon come out. and these pokemon have to be good. when people bring up gen 5 pokemon, do they bring up bisharp, volcarona, zoruark, hydreigon, haxorus, krookadile, or any of the other cool pokemon it has to offer. no. they only bring up the lines of kling, vanilite, the monkeys, and garbodor. those are just 14 of the 156 new pokemon introduced in gen 5, and yet they are the ones that get all the attention. and thats just the concepts they have to come up with. they also have to implimant the data for all of the previous pokemon they made, all in the best graphics feasable for the time. this may have been fine when there were only 300 pokemon, but in case you havent noticed, theres a bit more than that now. they have to code over 1000 pokemon in 3 years, while also coming up with new concepts for pokemon, people, places, and stories. they tried to mitigate this by including only some of the pokemon, but despite there being statistically 0 people who like heatmor, fans were outraged that game freak were hesitant to not include over 1000 pokemon in the new games. thats not the only shortcuts they tried to take to keep their buisness afloat. sword and shield is a very unpopular game, and yet few people try to ask why it was so bad. if they want to impliment 1000 different pokemon, a bunch of flashy mechanics, a giant world to explore, a compelling story, ballenced gameplay, and new creative designs, thats gonna cost the weekends of the aproxamately 400 employees who worked tirelessly to make sure the game was even released on time. people like to complain about the situation the games come out in, but under these circumstances, they were gonna complain no matter how the game came out, unless it were to be delayed, which is not an option if game freak wants to keep their buisness running. do you have any idea how cruel the japanese coding industry already is on the workers? they worked tirelessly to feed their families, and you have the audacity to insult their results?
 
Cancel cult said:
milotic is ugly, and i genuinely cant fathom how anyone could think otherwise
i understand why people dislike usum, but necrozma is badass. i would sacrifice all remakes, remasters, and b2w2 just for ultra necrozmas theme. throw in the pokemon itself, and i might add in legends arceus.
and finally,

if one more person complains about how buggy sv is, i will commit a crime of an unspecified but non-insignificant scale. game freak has to pump out a new pokemon game every three years, otherwise no new pokemon come out. that means the anime stops, the merch stops, to some extent the card game stops, and all sources of income for gamefreak are halted until new pokemon come out. and these pokemon have to be good. when people bring up gen 5 pokemon, do they bring up bisharp, volcarona, zoruark, hydreigon, haxorus, krookadile, or any of the other cool pokemon it has to offer. no. they only bring up the lines of kling, vanilite, the monkeys, and garbodor. those are just 14 of the 156 new pokemon introduced in gen 5, and yet they are the ones that get all the attention. and thats just the concepts they have to come up with. they also have to implimant the data for all of the previous pokemon they made, all in the best graphics feasable for the time. this may have been fine when there were only 300 pokemon, but in case you havent noticed, theres a bit more than that now. they have to code over 1000 pokemon in 3 years, while also coming up with new concepts for pokemon, people, places, and stories. they tried to mitigate this by including only some of the pokemon, but despite there being statistically 0 people who like heatmor, fans were outraged that game freak were hesitant to not include over 1000 pokemon in the new games. thats not the only shortcuts they tried to take to keep their buisness afloat. sword and shield is a very unpopular game, and yet few people try to ask why it was so bad. if they want to impliment 1000 different pokemon, a bunch of flashy mechanics, a giant world to explore, a compelling story, ballenced gameplay, and new creative designs, thats gonna cost the weekends of the aproxamately 400 employees who worked tirelessly to make sure the game was even released on time. people like to complain about the situation the games come out in, but under these circumstances, they were gonna complain no matter how the game came out, unless it were to be delayed, which is not an option if game freak wants to keep their buisness running. do you have any idea how cruel the japanese coding industry already is on the workers? they worked tirelessly to feed their families, and you have the audacity to insult their results?
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lol.
 
Cancel cult said:
if one more person complains about how buggy sv is, i will commit a crime of an unspecified but non-insignificant scale. game freak has to pump out a new pokemon game every three years, otherwise no new pokemon come out. that means the anime stops, the merch stops, to some extent the card game stops, and all sources of income for gamefreak are halted until new pokemon come out. and these pokemon have to be good. when people bring up gen 5 pokemon, do they bring up bisharp, volcarona, zoruark, hydreigon, haxorus, krookadile, or any of the other cool pokemon it has to offer. no. they only bring up the lines of kling, vanilite, the monkeys, and garbodor. those are just 14 of the 156 new pokemon introduced in gen 5, and yet they are the ones that get all the attention. and thats just the concepts they have to come up with. they also have to implimant the data for all of the previous pokemon they made, all in the best graphics feasable for the time. this may have been fine when there were only 300 pokemon, but in case you havent noticed, theres a bit more than that now. they have to code over 1000 pokemon in 3 years, while also coming up with new concepts for pokemon, people, places, and stories. they tried to mitigate this by including only some of the pokemon, but despite there being statistically 0 people who like heatmor, fans were outraged that game freak were hesitant to not include over 1000 pokemon in the new games. thats not the only shortcuts they tried to take to keep their buisness afloat. sword and shield is a very unpopular game, and yet few people try to ask why it was so bad. if they want to impliment 1000 different pokemon, a bunch of flashy mechanics, a giant world to explore, a compelling story, ballenced gameplay, and new creative designs, thats gonna cost the weekends of the aproxamately 400 employees who worked tirelessly to make sure the game was even released on time. people like to complain about the situation the games come out in, but under these circumstances, they were gonna complain no matter how the game came out, unless it were to be delayed, which is not an option if game freak wants to keep their buisness running. do you have any idea how cruel the japanese coding industry already is on the workers? they worked tirelessly to feed their families, and you have the audacity to insult their results?
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images
 
Yung Dramps said:
This is the based department. Calling you to notify we are impressed with your work



Unpopular opinions
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It's more that I think they have posted that specific rant (as in copy-pasted it from an old post to here) in another thread previously, and were met with a lot of pushback because several of the statements were viewed as going from opinionated to assumptions/misinformed. The... mocking reactions seem partially "this is dumb" but also a "oh it's this again" since I am pretty sure some of the preceding replies were people seeing that first posting.


If I may share an opinion of my own: Reactions to SV are ridiculously black and white. I swear I can't find a conversation outside of personal friend circles who play Pokemon (which is a bit specific as far as people I know well) that can see both pros and cons to the game. On a very basic example: people seem to actually pause and think when I say things like "Scarlet and Violet are some of the best designed games in the series, but the technical issues are still a serious problem they need to address for updates or any new games". Every other place online is either "these games are glitchy disasters" or "the game's are a great time, people are just hating" as if there's no spot in between on the spectrum.
 
Cancel cult said:
game freak has to pump out a new pokemon game every three years, otherwise no new pokemon come out. that means the anime stops, the merch stops, to some extent the card game stops, and all sources of income for gamefreak are halted until new pokemon come out.
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Income from the anime, card game, and merch does not stop completely over a longer development cycle. The revenue from merch sales far outweighs the revenue from game sales, even if it might slow down a bit.

Cancel cult said:
they were gonna complain no matter how the game came out, unless it were to be delayed, which is not an option if game freak wants to keep their buisness running
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The Pokemon games alone (not counting merch sales and other product, which make far more money) sell well enough that they could easily make enough money to pay programmers and artists over a longer development cycle and still remain profitable. It is not a choice between making an worse game versus financial insolvency, it is a choice between making a massive profit versus making an even more massive profit (very little of which, I might add, ends up in the hands of the people who did the work). Obviously, executives will basically always choose the latter, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have a choice and that doesn't mean you can't criticize them for making that choice.

Cancel cult said:
they worked tirelessly to feed their families, and you have the audacity to insult their results?
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This is a thought-terminating cliche. (Almost) every video game (movie, TV show, comic book, etc) is the product of hundreds of hours of work by dozens or hundreds of people. Does that mean that it is an "insult" to point out that you view any media product to technically flawed, lacking in artistry, or simply bad?
 
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pika pal said:
Reactions to SV are ridiculously black and white.
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UNOVA REMAKES CONFIRMED!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!ONE!!!!!!!!!ELEVEN!!!!!!!!!!!




But, uh, yes. It really does seem that for every “Second coming of Shart and Also Shart!!!!! Time for more installments of HiGhQuAlITyAnImAtIoNs!!!!!”, there’s an equally loud “These are the greatest Pokémon games since [insert personal peak of series here], haters gonna hate (and be wrong)!” In my humble opinion… I feel both are correct to a point. The bugs are definitely shameful, but it’s a great game nonetheless.
 
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