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.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
Do you see my point?
Do you see my point?
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?
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?
lol.
This is the based department. Calling you to notify we are impressed with your work
Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter dave
- Start dateFeb 18, 2015
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.
I don't consider the technical side to be the biggest reason why I'm not playing SV. There's been enough conscious decisions by the devs to create a game I'm not into that I don't need to worry about the unconscious ones. So, if anything, I object to "some of the best designed in the series" specifically.
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.
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.
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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Personally I think it'd be nice for developers to actually be able to spend time with the families they feed but maybe that's just me.
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.
Welcome to the world of Internet fandom, where the term "nuance" cannot be comprehended by people during online discussions on the likes of Reddit, Twitter, and especially 4chan.
You either think something is the best thing in the world and masterpiece, or it's a piece of utter shit. No in-between opinions. I have plenty of things to say about SV even if I personally consider it one of my favorite Pokemon games to date, even though my stance on the matter is that while it clearly isn't polished and the technical flaws are apparent, it has a lot of good in it and a lot of great things went into the game to make for a great game nonetheless and one that feels like a true step closer towards what a console-scale mainline Pokemon game should be. It's a damn fun game and I enjoyed my time with it so much.
Yet many fans do not know the difference between criticism and relentless complaining, and many also do not understand the idea that you can like something and still be critical of something at the same time. People who still buy and play certain games are not all blind yes-men who agree with everything, contrary to what your average terminally online person may believe, and people who criticize games or talk about their flaws are not all haters, also contrary to what your average terminally online person may believe.
SV has had many criticisms leveraged against it, and there is plenty to be critical of, but there's also tons of great things in my book that can be said about it that are worthy of praise, which I won't go too in depth about in this post, and those things are worth praising as things that would be great to expand upon and improve in future mainline entries: there's clearly many steps forward that can be taken even further. There's definitely ambition behind them, and a will to do great things shown in it, despite the technical issues and evident signs that it had to be pushed out to meet a deadline, which is of course worth being critical of at the same time.
Lo and behold, having a complicated/nuanced stance on something is very much possible!
You either think something is the best thing in the world and masterpiece, or it's a piece of utter shit. No in-between opinions. I have plenty of things to say about SV even if I personally consider it one of my favorite Pokemon games to date, even though my stance on the matter is that while it clearly isn't polished and the technical flaws are apparent, it has a lot of good in it and a lot of great things went into the game to make for a great game nonetheless and one that feels like a true step closer towards what a console-scale mainline Pokemon game should be. It's a damn fun game and I enjoyed my time with it so much.
Yet many fans do not know the difference between criticism and relentless complaining, and many also do not understand the idea that you can like something and still be critical of something at the same time. People who still buy and play certain games are not all blind yes-men who agree with everything, contrary to what your average terminally online person may believe, and people who criticize games or talk about their flaws are not all haters, also contrary to what your average terminally online person may believe.
SV has had many criticisms leveraged against it, and there is plenty to be critical of, but there's also tons of great things in my book that can be said about it that are worthy of praise, which I won't go too in depth about in this post, and those things are worth praising as things that would be great to expand upon and improve in future mainline entries: there's clearly many steps forward that can be taken even further. There's definitely ambition behind them, and a will to do great things shown in it, despite the technical issues and evident signs that it had to be pushed out to meet a deadline, which is of course worth being critical of at the same time.
Lo and behold, having a complicated/nuanced stance on something is very much possible!
Eh, personally I always try to focus on the things I like about the game instead of lingering on the dislikes for too long.
Like, sure, the frame drops can actually get annoying sometimes, wild pokemon's encounter triggers are a little weird sometimes and the textures in general would be sorta off. However, there's a ton of aspects of the game I unironically adored!
The open world, while a bit confusing at times, rly felt engaging and always left me wanting to explore. The tracks were legit fire (and the rearrangements of each area's theme for wild mon battles was something I didn't know I needed till now). The new mons were all pretty solid overall, some took a little to grow on me like brambleghast rabsca and scovillain, tho the small amount of regional forms was a little disappointing.
Sooooo yeah idk. I unironically enjoyed myself! They're not perfection ofc, but as I said earlier, I mostly skimp over them to focus on the good stuff. Feel free to disagree tho! (Respectfully ofc, I don't wanna be harassed for this...)
Like, sure, the frame drops can actually get annoying sometimes, wild pokemon's encounter triggers are a little weird sometimes and the textures in general would be sorta off. However, there's a ton of aspects of the game I unironically adored!
The open world, while a bit confusing at times, rly felt engaging and always left me wanting to explore. The tracks were legit fire (and the rearrangements of each area's theme for wild mon battles was something I didn't know I needed till now). The new mons were all pretty solid overall, some took a little to grow on me like brambleghast rabsca and scovillain, tho the small amount of regional forms was a little disappointing.
Sooooo yeah idk. I unironically enjoyed myself! They're not perfection ofc, but as I said earlier, I mostly skimp over them to focus on the good stuff. Feel free to disagree tho! (Respectfully ofc, I don't wanna be harassed for this...)
ok, but seriously though, you are asking a company to make decisions that arent in the companies best interest? a company that is owned by nintendo, who, as shown before, will do anything for money, including forcing a man into a life of servitude. if satoshi tajiri dosent comply, he can kiss his job goodbye. and by the way, you really shouldnt complain about a game that is still geting updated being buggy.
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Yes, yes, capitalism is an unrelenting hellscape that destroys art, we're aware. Doesn't mean we stop complaining about it.
I'm fascinated that someone can look at something so deeply and profoundly vindictive, brutal and evil (even if Gary Bowser did act maliciously, the penalty vastly outweighs the crime) and come away with the conclusion not that Nintendo and all other big companies are tyrannic hegemonies that need to be kept in check, but that it's fine, actually! We should all just be grateful that we can play the video game, and that GF and TPC actually compensate their employees for their labor!
...So, uh, Pokemon, huh? Let's change the subject a bit. I don't think it's at all fair to classify Mega Evolution as a gimmick in the same way that Z-Moves, Dyanamax, and Terastal are, because Mega Evolution is unique on a 'mon-by-'mon basis and fundamentally changes the way they play. There were unique Z-Moves and Gigantamaxes, but aside from a solitary gimmick they usually didn't change the way a Pokemon could play in the same way that Megas could. The other gimmicks all share general universality, and for that reason they fall flat in my eyes since they tend to blend together (and also, makes predictions a giant nightmare, if you've ever played gen 9, 7, or the very early pre-dynamax ban days of gen 8). Aesthetically speaking, I find Mega Evolutions much more pleasing just because they bring something definitively new to a specific species, and in terms of competitive play I find them much more naturally telegraphed than the other gimmicks.
In particular, I disagree with the notion that Mega Evolution is somehow particularly associated with Kalos. For better or worse, the other gimmicks are deeply linked with the lore of their home region - Z-Moves are borne of lingering otherwordly energy from Ultra Wormholes, Dynamax is a result of special particles from Eternatus congregating in Power Spots after the Darkest Day, Terastal... will likely be expanded on in DLC but seems to result from something in Area Zero, you get the gist. By contrast, Mega Evolution is a phenomenon that canonically originated in two seperate instances - in Hoenn, and Kalos - and both cases are a little less specific than the other gimmicks (Sycamore guesses Mega Stones came from fallout from the Ultimate Weapon, and the Draconids believe Mega Evolution is a gift from Rayquaza).
The condescending implication of that image will definitely help your case in the discussion.
The man was having wages garnished while he was in prison and making pennies at best. The salary cut Nintendo takes is clearly more about intimidating pirates than the actual revenue for them, so I wouldn't consider it apt to this particular topic.
As for recommending TPC/Nintendo do this, yes it would cost them some amount of money, but the opposite consideration is the brand image and protection from releasing more technically stable products over a more prolonged time period. Pokemon is a massive outlier in terms of tech quality among games associated with Nintendo as a Publisher, bordering on a laughing stock in less generous circles, not to mention the series' rapid release pace runs a very real risk of fatigue, as one could argue was the case with annual releases for franchises like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed, or even a factor in the end of "Poke-mania" in the transition from Gen 2 to 3.
The monetary expense is not the only factor that goes into decisions about the Development cycle, and we can very much complain to TPC for keeping a crunched schedule even if it's not the fault of Gamefreak as the developing team. Additionally I fail to see why we can't complain about a game being buggy because they are releasing updates for it. Several Triple A releases get lambasted for problems on release that are supposed to be fixed via updates, why is Pokemon the exception? This is especially the case when the patches have been fixing game breaking interactions that emerge from incompetent design (such as the Bad Eggs and Paradox raid crashes) while the source of several complaints (that being the poor technical performance) has not been "fixed" by the patches in a significant capacity nor shown any roadmap of such (if it can be fixed at all post-release).
I get having an unpopular opinion as per the thread, but the statements made to argue against the dissent towards said opinion come across as either one sided or incredibly irrational/illogical in places.
Said most of what I have, and the other thing that annoys me about Mega Portability is that it's basically designed to be expanded Gen to Gen, with like 10 or so new Megas for Pokemon each go, rather than being thrown out with the "everyone can use it" gimmicks that clearly were not designed with any actual Pokemon in mind and resulting in inevitable "win more rich get richer" situations.