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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
Eh, don't worry, the Sonic fandom will cannibalize that victory. I should know...
But legit, Pokemon if they're not careful will be as ridiculed as Sonic was early 2000s. There are already a lot of fandom parallels, I don't want to see it leech out into common casual thought that furthers bias
TCPi/Nintendo actually aknowledging rushed releases hopefully will prevent that, but it won't mean much if sentiment is too sour to actually experiment. Even worse if they simply appease people that aren't actually buying the games. For now though, we'll see...
this is literally the most popular pokemon take of all-time, no cap
I'm not so certain. People have legit argued that yearly releases are good, actually, because the law of averages means a chance that we get a really good game every couple of years as opposed to a really good game once every 3 or 4 years
Thanks, this has enlightened me by precisely 0%
"it was OU once so you're wrong and i'm right" is what the person meant with his very informative 1liner+screenshot.
Though if you're interested in actual context of why it was actually good in gen 3 and only in gen 3, I got you covered
Thanks, figured it was something along those lines. Just drives me nuts when people say shit like "ah, but are you aware of the Klempaderkinus Theory?" and then resolutely fail to actually explain what it actually means
charizard was not considered good in 2015 idk what you're talking about
Yes, but are you aware of the Klempaderkinus Theory?
Sir first you contest someone saying charizard was never good by showing a screenshot when Charizard was OU in gen 3, then you contest me linking a competitive history video saying that Charizard was legitimate in gen 3 OU saying it was not good
Are you ok? Need some help? Have you considered writing more than one liners as well while at it?
charizard was UUBL in 2015. charizard still has the same analysis it had in 2015 (albeit with a disclaimer).
Ugh, remind me of when people were casually dropping "Sam type" and "Dean type" into conversations. Never watched Supernatural, only vaguely aware of it, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one, yet now I'm expected to know the personalities of the Winchester brothers. (Heck, I still sort of don't get it; I think Sam is more "emotional/empathetic" and Dean is more "logical/realist"... which leads to my point of, if there's a dictionary word you can be using instead, USE THE DICTIONARY WORD!)
*Looks up Klempaderkinus Theory*
... So I got two results for that, k·p perturbation theory and K-theory, and after skimming through both I must ask what exactly conversation was this that physics & string theory concepts were brought up?
NEW UNPOPULAR OPINION:
So, can we get another Super Mechanic that's not directly connected to a Pokemon?
Like, while it's said Mega Evos came about due to the Aura Duo's energy mutating Evo Stones, that's more of a throwaway line than trying to connect the Mega Evo mechanic theme. Mega Evo didn't have a "poster Pokemon", MAYBE Diancie, and by ORAS they seemingly retcon the Aura Duo's involvement. But after that the Super Mechanic had a Pokemon directly connected to it:
Z-Moves had Necrozma, the Z-Crystals being pieces of its body & having a special form.
Dynamax/Gigantamax had Eternatus, its life energy causing the phenomenon & having a special form.
And now Terastal has Terapagos, while how it relates to Terastal isn't clear yet we now know it has a special form.
Now I'm not saying that they can't have a Pokemon which as a special form using a Super Mechanic, but would like it just be because in-lore the Pokemon just took advantage of a unique Super Mechanic that was available without directly being tied into it.
I would've agreed with this wholeheartedly about 2 weeks ago but I'll admit that the fact enough people were unironically demanding the reveal of BW3 or whatever at the last direct to the point of making "Unova" trend on Twitter has shaken my confidence a fair bit. Yeah yeah I know like you said it's a big world and a big fanbase, but that scene showed me that a lot of people are either insincere about asking them to slow down or just don't care
sorry for bumping this kind of dead topic i just needed an excuse to briefly rant about this
I'll play devil's advocate a bit and say that you can wish to have a game announced so you know it exists, and also wish that it doesn't release this year and/or is polished to a satisfactory degree by having enough dev time.
I know that's my case at least. I wouldn't mind new Unova games being announced right now, but I would indeed mind them being released right now.
I know that's my case at least. I wouldn't mind new Unova games being announced right now, but I would indeed mind them being released right now.
Alright, they can have a Pokemon with history of the region show it off, but I'm more asking for there not to be a Pokemon which is either responsible or defined by the super mechanic.
Going back to Mega Evos, there's two/three cases of that. First with the Aura Duo, Sycamore says he believes its their energy which radiated Evo Stones which became Mega Stones. However, the Aura Duo don't even have a Mega, and they don't directly have power over Mega but rather its more of a side effect of their energy. Second is Diancie which is the only Gen VI mon that has a Mega and it having a possible connection to the Anistar Sundial (both being pink and crystal) which has something to do with Mega, or at least detecting Mega Stones. Third is Rayquaza which has a special Mega Evo (or at least in the way which it Mega Evolves); not to mention Groudon and Kyogre having their own special variant of Mega.
Like, of the Super Mechanics after Mega, I'd say Terastal didn't really need to be connected to a Pokemon. Z-Moves & Dynamax, with the way its presented and story they told needed a Pokemon to justify not just its existence but why only that region had the mechanics (and the way the mechanic was presented). But with Terastal, they already established the strangeness with Area Zero, from the story and lore they setup they didn't need a Pokemon directly connected to it (and it was their decision not to have special versions of Terastal, though now Ogerpon is getting one and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Terastal). Terapagos feels like something they tacked on just cause the previous gens had an originator of the Super Mechanic.
The issue is how short-sighted that becomes now that Dexit is a standard, as it means if the Pokemon appears as a non-home Transfer, eventually it will beg the question why it doesn't bring the mechanic with it, whether specific to itself or in general. Necrozma gets a pass since Z-Crystals kind of come about from it being injured and parts scattering, and Megas are uncertain while being from infused stones they can handwave as the player never finding.
Eternatus is the one they have to watch now since it is explicitly what provides Dynamax Energy to Galar by appearing and existing. At the same time Eternatus is extra-terrestrial apparently, which will beg the question of if they keep it a one-off species (since it being captured is canon) or explain it as another one landing (yet not causing another Dynamax phenomenon).
The thing I'm learning is that despite being 6+ Gens in when they planned these 1-off Regional Gimmicks, GF is not very good at future-proofing their Legendary Pokemon when linking them into said mechanics without just shrugging at the implication on the world (which given the reaction to Dexit and Mega/Z-move removal, they did not foresee or weren't prepared to respond to adequately).
I also feel like a lot of Pokemon fans online, especially on social media, aren't smart enough to really pick up on things (I don't mean this in a deliberately insulting way) and so any time Pokemon decides to do a Presents which creates an expectation that something new will be revealed, generally always expect something mainline at least.
In this particular instance I think many have not picked up on the fact that DLC is functionally supposed to act as the year's flagship mainline release, and that in this case SV's DLC is effectively the 2023 "mainline game". SV and SwSh's DLC is functionally equivalent to a third version as they've said, but it's also not totally a new game like Emerald or Platinum, so the fact that it fulfills the same role from a release schedule POV means that fact is something many people don't seem to comprehend.
They also have a pretty rigid pattern nowadays of mainline games first being revealed around Pokemon Day, or maybe a little earlier than it, and then having info dropped every month five months before release little by little, but people haven't realized that this is what they're doing with the SV DLC.
If it does, it’ll almost certainly be in the context of another extradimensional Legendary spam that we’re obviously meant to not think too closely about. I don’t think we should seriously anticipate Eternatus or Terapagos ever having an actual role of substance in a different region’s story.
(Plus, at least as far as Eternatus goes, lore-wise, its sheer existence is only part of the cause of Dynamax. Even in Galar, Dynamax could only occur at specific Power Spots. It’s not as if having Eternatus in your party allows you to break that rule, so I’d suggest the possibility that Eternatus’s power alone isn’t enough to cause Dynamaxing unless it has absorbed a huge amount of power, in which case you get the Darkest Day. Instead, I think it seems as though Eternatus’s longtime presence in the Galar region caused the gradual formation of an network of energy pools where Dynamax can be technologically induced.)
Honestly even then, I'd love if they do a very small lore reference like they've done for Dynamax dens.
Peony makes some very funny remarks about some of the legendaryes you can catch, and you actually have a small dialogue for the gift Cosmog that implies it came from a ultrarift somewhere (as well that implying ultra rifts may be the cause of the legendaries appearing in first place).
Thinking of it, ultrarifts more or less give them a easy, repeatable "excuse" for legendary spam anyway.
The series certainly isn’t short of spatial phenomena that make this possible. Hoopa’s rings and Ultra Wormholes have been used for the three instances thus far, but you just know that if Legends: Arceus had to have a Legendary spam, we’d have been finding those suckers in space-time distortions.
It’s really just the most practical way to explain the appearance of so many supposedly unique, often story-relevant Pokémon in a foreign region without tying their individual lore into knots.
Of course, even without factoring in “lynchpin for the generational battle mechanic” Legendaries, this was something that was just flat-out easier to avoid for the first few generations because the lore for Legendaries tended to be a lot simpler. There’s a pretty big difference between the Legendary Birds (who have no intrinsic ties to Kanto, no backstory, and can easily be reframed as very rare migratory birds) or the Legendary Beasts (who, despite being connected to a specific event in Johto’s history, are characterized as running freely across huge distances, and never happened to show up further away than Kanto before wormhole spam became an option anyway) versus the Tapu (who are sacred deities of the Alola region, with each tied to a particular island and all of them sharing a specific Alolan aesthetic in their design, and playing a direct role in the region’s cultural processes). Even if you don’t assume that the Tapu are unique one-off species, they still don’t really have any sensible business appearing in a non-Alolan region (unless they made regional forms of them, I suppose).
Little acknowledgements like Peony’s commentary are fine though, because it’s clearly just fluff.
This has always been the case, in major and minor ways.
- Necrozma's Burst Form is just straight-up gone now; they could have made an alternative way to get it, but they didn't
- Diantha says "Xerneas and Yveltal are found only here in Kalos!" which I snorted with laughter at the first time I played XY as it seemed dead certain to be proven wrong
- Mega Evolutions in general. It literally took GF one game to break their own design rule for megas (you have to hold a stone to mega evolve), thus making Mega Rayquaza incredibly broken
- We're told, very clearly, that there are only three Type:Null in existence; it took literally one game for them to disregard this and go "yeah, nah, someone made more!"
- Similarly we're told - multiple times - that only one Mewtwo was made, causing understandable confusion when others appear in the games and anime
You know, I was about to write something about about how the subpar quality of recent games is down to Game Freak increasingly cutting corners on its development cycles - there's a bunch of angrily-titled articles out there saying that Pokemon needs to take more time with its games, after all.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/its-time-for-pokemon-to-end-the-three-year-cycle-opinion
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/08/pokemon-companys-coo-addresses-issue-between-release-schedule-and-game-quality#:~:text=Given the rapid pace at,might be affecting the overall
https://gamingbolt.com/pokemon-scarlet-and-violet-what-the-hell-happened#:~:text=Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are,innumerable delays across the board.
Given that, I'd been under the impression that Game Freak haven't been giving themselves enough time to make quality games like they used to. But then I was like "no, let's actually look that up and be sure".
The results... don't support that conclusion, actually. Looking over the history of the franchise since the original games, yes release dates have quickened overall. But it doesn't appear as though development times have quickened to match this. I think it's also instructive to look at the time between announcements and releases, for reasons that I'll make clear.
- Red/Green - stated by official sources to have taken around six years: the original release date for Pokémon Red and Green was December 1995, but they were ultimately released in February 1996 (Blue came at the end of the same year, Yellow came in September 1998).
- Gold/Silver - famously had a quite protracted development period, which began not long after the release of Red and Green. Announced in 1997 for an end-of-year release, which was pushed back at least once for an eventual November 1999 release. Details about a Pokemon game that would eventually become Pokemon Crystal (then referred to as Pokemon X) were reported in various media in December 1999 and slated for an April 2000 release, but Crystal ultimately was released in December 2000. Ho-Oh aside, the first Gen II Pokemon to appear in the anime was Togepi in June 1998, almost a year and a half before the games were out.
- Ruby/Sapphire - again had a notoriously difficult/protracted development, which is confirmed to have started in 2000; released in November 2002. Notably, the demo from July/August 2002 is (some minor differences aside) pretty much identical to the finished game. FireRed and LeafGreen were announced in September 2003 and released January 2004; Emerald was announced July 2004 and released in September. We got Gen III Pokemon showing up in the anime in July 2001, again almost a full eighteen months before the games themselves were released.
- Diamond/Pearl - presumably started development in mid-2004 (or possibly even early 2003) as they were announced in October 2004. They were initially slated for a mid-2005 release, but not released until September 2006. Notably, Platinum's release was not for another two years: September 2008, which was pushed back slightly from an initial announced August release in May of that year. HGSS were then announced in May 2009 for a September 2009 release; I haven't found anything indicating how long those games took to develop. The first Gen IV Pokemon to appear in the anime was Munchlax in July 2004 (having been officially revealed in May); more than two years before DP came out, though it went on to appear in various other games prior to DP.
- Black/White - In an interview held in either late 2010 or early 2011, Junichi Masuda confirms that "[Black and White's development] began about four years ago", placing the start of the game's development period around 2006 - the games were announced in April 2010 for a subsequent September 2010 release. B2W2 were announced in Feburary 2012 for a June 2012 release: it's been mentioned in interviews that the sequels were not planned during BW's development, so likely began production after those games' release or shortly before. The first Gen V Pokemon to appear were Zorua and Zoroark, both revealed in February 2010.
awkward...
- X/Y - took three and a half years to develop in total: announced January 2013 and released in October 2013, so would have been in development from either late 2009 or very early 2010 if "three and a half years" isn't an exact figure. ORAS apparently had only one year of development, for a November 2014 release. The first Gen VI Pokemon to be revealed were Chespin, Fennekin, Froakie, Xerneas, and Yveltal simultaneously in January 2013.
- Sun/Moon - Development of Sun&Moon started immediately after ORAS was completed, and took around three years. This doesn't tally exactly with the two years between releases, but if we assume development of ORAS was finished in mid-2014 this would roughly make it two and a half years. However I wonder if the stated "three years" figure might include some time spent on a considered "Z" game, elements of which seem to have been folded into Sun&Moon. USUM were stated to have been worked on by a smaller, younger, and less experienced development team numbering roughly half of the workforce who developed the base SM games while the rest of the team focused on the next generation. Sun&Moon were announced in February 2016 for a November release, which has become the standard for all mainline first releases since. The first Gen VII Pokemon revealed was Magearna in February 2016, a handful of days prior to the announcement of the Gen VII titles.
- LGPE - confirmed to have taken two years to make; announced in May 2018 for a November 2018 release.
- Sword/Shield - announced February 2019 for a November 2019 release. There's notoriously been some disagreement in the fandom about how much time it took for these titles to be developed, but what seems certain is that conceptual planning began immediately following the release of Sun&Moon in 2016 while physical development of the games began in 2017, giving an overall development time of three years. The first Gen VIII Pokemon announced were Zacian, Zamazenta, Grookey, Scorbunny, and Sobble simultaneously during the announcement of the Gen VIII games.
- LA - production apparently began during the Sword/Shield development cycle in 2018, taking three years overall.
- Scarlet/Violet - Started production in late 2019, announced in February 2022 for a November 2022 release - again, the first Gen IX Pokemon (Sprigatito, Fuecoco, Quaxly, Koraidon, and Miraidon) were revealed simultaneously with the announcement of new games.
All this taken into account, we can see that pretty much all of the new games after RS have had, on average, a three-year development time: some a little more, but none of them less (remakes, by their nature, take far less time to develop). What jumps out at me is that even Black and White - which one might assume would have taken less time thanks to being on the same console as the previous generation - had an equivalent development timeline to other generation-launching games, with production beginning not long after DP's release.
The circumstances aren't exactly identical for Sun/Moon, but as I alluded to above it's commonly thought that Game Freak changed tack from a Kalos revision to a completely new set of games. Whatever the case, those games still had the same three-year development timeframe as equivalent games. The shortest confirmed development time besides ORAS is for LGPE, which has the justification of including far fewer Pokemon than contemporary titles do and also being a remake.
So, in sum, it's pretty clear that development timeframes are not the issue at hand for a perceived lessening in quality, since they haven't changed massively over the years. The increase in the speed (and amount) of release dates is slightly concerning, but they're separate - albeit connected - issues. Why the need for more releases if they're still taking the same amount of time to make?
It's interesting to me that while RG, GS, and DP all had at least one delay during their development, games released subsequent to DP have not. Now, perhaps quality control at Game Freak has simply improved since then, but I find that highly unlikely given that video game delays are still very much a thing in 2023. I don't think Pokemon is somehow immune from what is simply an industry-wide occurrence. So it does cause me to wonder whether there's an edict now from somewhere that delays are not acceptable. You've only to look at the number of titles in the series recently which have had day-one issues, such as BDSP - not made by Game Freak, of course, but still ultimately likely subject to TPC's mandates when it comes to matters such as release dates, publicity, and creature/character design.
All games have glitches, of course, and multiple Pokemon games have been patched and fixed even before doing that online was possible, so the prevalence of online patches for later games doesn't prove anything. However, I still do think that the increased speed of releases points to a shift in attitudes. From DP onward the timeframe between games being announced to games being released has been much shorter on average.
As I alluded to above, it's not just release dates that have quickened: the way new Pokemon are teased has also changed markedly. Previously, a handful of next-generation Pokemon would be slowly rolled out over a protracted period, but that's not the case any more. Imagine having a Pokemon revealed now and not getting it in the games for another 18 months. In fact, ScVi's Teal Mask DLC - revealed in February for a September release - is one of the longest waits there's been for an announced new release that wasn't a generation debut in a long time. Even Platinum, which took two years to arrive after DP, only had a four-month wait from its announcement to its release.
Why has the pattern shifted the way it has? Maybe it's simply a business decision - we know Nintendo and Game Freak obviously want to hit the holiday market, and an early-year announcement leading up to a late-year release hits that pattern well. But that doesn't explain why new Pokemon (and new content in general) don't get the leadup they once did. Maybe it's the perceived "short attention span" mantra we keep hearing about (this one's on my mind today due to the recent passing of Michael Parkinson; listening to the radio and someone said that the reason chat shows aren't as good any more is because people nowadays have poor attention spans, as though podcasts aren't a hugely popular form of entertainment now).
The problem is the amount of projects they're working on at once. To put it in perspective, why was the development of Gen II difficult? Because Game Freak were also preoccupied with the development of Pokemon Stadium and the localisation of the first generation, both of which diverted time and resources away from the new games. The development of RS was also difficult, but that's been put down to very different reasons - and you'll notice that development of Pokemon Colosseum isn't cited as a difficulty during RS's development time. That'd be down to that game being made by a different studio - obviously, the two teams worked together closely as Colosseum is compatible with not just RS but also FRLG.
Game Freak has made some smaller side games alongside the main series, but all of the major spin-off games since Stadium were developed at least partially by other studios (Creatures, Inc developed the PokePark series, Bandai Namco developed Snap, the Ranger series was developed by both HAL and Creatures, Inc, Genius Sonority made PBR, ColoXD, and Trozei, Spike Chunsoft made the Mystery Dungeon series, Niantic made Pokemon Go... I could go on). But Game Freak developed LGPE, L:A, and Pokemon HOME in tandem with SwSh and ScVi.
This has to be a factor in why recent games have been so unpolished. They've been splitting their focus - allegedly, SwSh's development team was younger and less experienced, presumably because more experienced colleagues were taken up with LGPE and L:A. Looking at Gens III, IV, V, and VI, the primary focus was always the main series. But now they're split multiple ways, and I'm finding it hard not to think that that's the reason for the subpar quality of new releases - it doesn't matter how much time you've got, reduce the manpower and the results will be inferior.
Ironically HOME is the one thing that was repeatedly delayed recently (and what a shitshow that was) but that almost proves my point in a way - you can release a full game with some unfinished aspects and just about get away with it, but you really can't release a storage app if it's not capable of doing the one thing it's meant to do - storage.
Anyway, didn't mean for this to turn into an essay but that's what happens when I reflect on the growing crappiness of modern Pokemon I guess!
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