Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
So, about Johto... Y'know, I replayed HGSS a couple months ago and thinking about it, the lack of meaningful rewards for exploration in Johto were more of an issue than the level curve.
It is bad, sure, but it doesn't make the game straight up unplayable. It does, however, mean that you'll miss key level thresholds for the climax of the game. Namely Lv. 36. This has an impact on game feel.
Johto is almost designed in a way where you're expected to go off the rails after getting Surf to match levels with Chuck, but it's done in a way where you don't really have an incentive to do so. Do y'all feel the same?
Johto's level curve issues would be more forgivable if you fought the E4 at a higher level, yes, but since fixing the level curve would get you to that higher level... I think there's a reason that not keeping the level curve as the front and center issue is an unpopular opinion.
Yes though, Johto's levels absolutely make more sense if you backtrack repeatedly whenever you get a new tool, and absolutely yes there's no particular reason to do so.
Yes though, Johto's levels absolutely make more sense if you backtrack repeatedly whenever you get a new tool, and absolutely yes there's no particular reason to do so.
And it really is a shame because that would've made for a much better experience, but you really get NOTHING out of it lmao. The Dark Cave is probably the worst offender. I get that they don't want people to get into Blackthorn early, but man, can't I at least get Skarmory earlier? Some of those extra trainers? Anything? okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay
To add onto the difficulty discussion, they should definitely also force a limit on item usage in someway. Like on Normal mode you get to use 5 items against a gym leader/champion meanwhile on Hard you get 2-3.
Or heck, add in ZAs item cooldown mechanic so you can’t just spam revives and potions behind a tank after getting 5 mons wiped out on each side
You know how it is, sometimes we go off into random tangents and wind up in unexpected locations. Unlike Prime 4. God I hate that game.
So, about Johto... Y'know, I replayed HGSS a couple months ago and thinking about it, the lack of meaningful rewards for exploration in Johto were more of an issue than the level curve.
It's just about the smallest region but my god do they stuff it full of places to go. Literally every route has at least one branching path or inaccessible area that opens up with backtracking. Route 32 has a guy who'll give you the TM for Roar, Cherrygrove City has that fisherman who'll give you the Mystic Water, Slowpoke Well has a basement level where you get the King's Rock, Route 34 has those three girls. I could go on.
Even when the rewards aren't all that great (because there's a wide spectrum from "cool new TM" to "Mystic Water") the fact that there is still something to find when you go looking is fantastic, because it impresses upon you that you should be actively going back to explore and looking around. I ended up going to Kanto way earlier than the game intends because the notion "explore every possible location as thoroughly as you can" was drummed into my head so thoroughly by that point; you can get a Rare Candy and a Moon Stone in that area before you're able to use Waterfall, so it's not a total loss. Union Cave is pretty much the star example of this: it has multiple lower floors which lead to different areas so you're actively encouraged to go through it more than once, and the Lapras you can find there is a nice example of something I never needed a guide for - younger me simply remembered the NPCs telling you "on Fridays/weekends, you can hear roars from deep in the cave" and went back to explore it as soon as I could. Similarly, there's an NPC in Mt Mortar in Crystal (I'm not sure if he's there in GS) who hints at the existence of the Karate King in Mt Mortar: "A while back, this karate dude wanted to battle. He was ridiculously good. He just thrashed us silly. He went in deeper saying it was for his training. I wonder how he is?" That alone was the encouragement I needed to explore the cave and find him. And you literally get a new Pokemon for doing that! If that's not a decent reward I don't know what is.
If anything, I'd say it's a fault with later games that don't have enough to explore that earlier ones set the bar high. SwSh got rightfully shat on because all of Galar's routes are corridors with barely any side paths, which is one reason I've so little interest in them.
So my potentially hot take is that Johto's level curve exacerbates an issue that permeates several Pokemon games: The lack of variety to fights as has come up from the difficulty discussion.
Most of Johto's bosses lack any particular strategy where anything besides "hit them until they faint" summarizes the steps for either side. Johto's infamous power curve just results in a lot of Mons being on their low power midgame moves for more of the run's content while just kind of whaling on whatever you're up against, and the opponents are similarly not using particularly strong offense in most cases with rare exceptions like HG/SS Clair's Kingdra or Chuck's Poliwrath Fighting STAB (both have caveats in GSC or HGSS to the move it uses though). It highlights the gameplay loop being "click A on move" because you're still doing it, but for longer when even the Rocket Mooks often take 2-3 hits to take out their mons.
As funny an example as this sounds, the Sinjoh Creation Trio actually has the simple solution of... adjusting their movepool. All 3 Dragons learn their HG/SS moves within 46 levels, compared to capping at 90 in the Sinnoh games themselves, so they have a steady progression that takes maybe a bit of grinding if you want their big STAB move at the Elite 4, while learning decently strong coverage on the 20's-30's climb and having TM/HM access for stuff like Surf and Shadow Ball. Compare Typhlosion for example which is stuck with Base 40-60 moves or the unreliable-accuracy of the Fire Blast TM (also low PP for Rocket Grunt gauntlets) until Lava Plume at Mid-30's or endgame 40's for Flamethrower (or you can grind Voltorb Flip for an hour or two if lucky). So despite outleveling the enemy mons, they don't feel much stronger for most of the game unless they're lucky like a decent SpA Water with Surf.
Johto's level curve wouldn't be an issue if the mons themselves were assessed to fit it instead of grinding to a halt mid-game. So many Kanto mons with stats that'd help if they got a half-decent reliable move before 12 levels after capture (or didn't have the Stone Evo issue of mons like Growlithe) but their learnsets feel built around Kanto in both versions despite them presumably getting at least a brief once-over when imported for the sequel in GSC and having time + 2 more gens of experience for HGSS
My current unpopular opinion is that the worldbuilding Pokémon has been doing during the Switch era is pretty terrible.
More specifically, certain story choices like the Gym Challenge, the Treasure Hunt and the urban redevelopment project feel like the series is constantly trying to justify its own setting and it comes off as really insecure. Like, the premise of Pokémon is pretty flimsy as it is, do we really have to spend 2 real life hours on an introduction explaining why it makes perfect sense that these kids aren't in school, actually? This is only my take on it, but all you really need is an NPC talking about how they're excited for summer vacation. Boom, done, let's go pokémoning.
At worst, decisions like these actually hurt the believability of the settings, because now we actually have One School and the Pokémon League being responsible for the entire region. Or how Lumiose City now has wealth inequality and multiple people talk about how having fire-breathing dragons living in front of your house would suck, actually!
With a setting like this, you can either handwave certain worldbuilding elements because you're experiencing the world through the eyes of a child, or you could lean into the fact that this is un unrealistic solarpunk utopia and have fun with the locations.
(For the record, I think "worldbuilding" in the sense of "this character knows this other character" is generally fine)
You mention difficulty through the lens of execution, and yes, the main series games don't have that. (Though the Legends games definitely do, which is it's own interesting angle to look at things from but not here)
There is such thing as Conceptual Difficulty, ie how difficult it is to understand what you need to do to succeed. It can be thought of as a measure of how smooth of a translation can be made from an explanation of the actions needed to complete a task to the sequence of button inputs in your mind like a Rhythm game or a Tool-Assisted Superplay. Pokemon is a game which relies solely on conceptual difficulty in game design, an element which makes it comparable to puzzle games, strategy games, and other purely turn based RPGs.
When looking at difficulty in these kinds of games, it's most important to consider what I'll call Total Scope and Reasonable Scope. These terms refer to the range of gamestates a player can be in when encountering any specific situation, considering the long and short term condition changes they have made previously, with the Total Scope including near everything that isn't completely self sabotaging and the Reasonable Scope leaning towards outcomes that make sense given the developer's expectations for the player. With many games these Scopes are possibly understandable when simplified, if not outright calculatable mathematically, and as a result you can design difficulty around those gamestates even when they vary fairly widely like in an RPG. In Pokemon, even the number of gamestates within the Reasonable Scope is so unbelievably massive that it's difficult to oversimplify. In most cases, after only the second gym the Reasonable Scope is already impossible to grasp, and it only balloons exponentially after that. Designing difficulty around that wide a range is absurd, especially as modern games continue to push the power ceiling for the most effective choices higher and higher. It's not a failing of the developers in any respect for the games to have unsatisfactory difficulty for most players because the range of possibilities is so absurdly massive.
Needless extrapolation on this when I thought I had something more to say
Total Scope refers to the totality of all potential game states a player can be in and all choices they can make in that game state. In its purest form, this is relevant for players who are completely oblivious to anything about a game, from mechanics to genre conventions to even how exactly to map their hand's inputs to button prompts on a screen or players who are navigating a language barrier. But on a level past that, (and especially in a setting where Role Playing is involved, which more than puzzle / strategy games pushes players toward unoptimal decisions for aesthetic reasons and don't enforce an equal start for all players) a less mind bogglingly large view of Total Scope can be all possible choices that aren't deliberately and obviously self-sabotaging. In single player Pokémon, self-sabotage would include in-battle decisions such as switching over and over again infinitely or wasting turns with Pokeballs in Trainer Battles, or out of battle decisions such as removing all of a pokemon's damage dealing moves, removing all battle ready / on level curve pokemon from your party, or selling and buying back all of your bag items to purposely waste money. I'd also argue it includes choices which are self-sabotaging a player's own enjoyment with the game, such as grinding any pokemon to Level 100 over the course of the game's main story, or otherwise spending excess time hunting for an extremely specific outcomes like Pokerus, Shiny Pokemon, or even just a specific pokemon with a single specific nature. That's a lot of exclusions to describe the opposite of what I'm defining, so don't miss the core point being made here - even when tons of fat is trimmed, the Total Scope of these games in almost any situation is UNBELIEVABLY MASSIVE. There are hundreds of pokemon, the vast majority of which have access to dozens of attacks which can be put into hundreds of technically effective combinations. All of that comes into play before a single turn of battle has played out, and doesn't account for the enormous differences that can result from players running into battles unprepared in some way, whether statuses, low on HP, or even out of PP on relevant moves. Even as you go earlier and earlier into the game and narrow this scope, things are well beyond reasonably measurable by the end of the first gym battle.
Reasonable Scope refers to the portion of the positions within the Total Scope that you would expect a player engaging with the game to reach through reasonable choices. This is also nebulous and impossible to precisely define, but broadly it's a way to look at how the difficulty of a game might be impacted by a player's increased understanding of the game as they learn about a game's system.
And as much as going over how different game states might fall into Reasonable Scope would be fun, sorry! Because with any amount of reductions, the amount of gamestates in the Reasonable Scope is still UNBELIEVABLY MASSIVE. Even if you start to assume players make optimal decisions on every possible turn in battle, even when you only consider players who make moveset choices with no dead slot options or redundancy, and even when players always prepare for every fight, it's just too much. (Here I realized this was world salad and I don't know how to finish this thought effectively.)
Something something the games can really only afford the teaching bandwidth to try and teach the type chart and the rest of what you need is to understand is vibes where bigger dudes with bigger numbers swing better idk I might update this later
Somebody mentioned Difficulty Selections and I think those are pretty terrible for the series as well because placing yourself as a player within Reasonable Scopes of gamestates requires wayyy too much out of game knowledge to know what choice you'd even want to make. You don't know what change you'll want until you come up upon any given situation and lose, which is bad, or until you've already steamrolled one too many opponents, which is worse. Any non-linear elements can cause a player to mistakenly misassign themselves an ill-fitting difficulty. An invisible scaling difficulty is better in outcome but is insanely hard to craft given the way type matchups can dramatically sway any given team's moment to moment effectiveness.
Run & Bun is accurately described here when played as an RPG. It's miserable. But it's obviously not how the game is designed to be interfaced with - Run & Bun is a strategy game. Level Caps + Rare Candies is a pair of mechanics designed to dramatically reign in the Reasonable Scope of the game, cramping down on the possible power ceiling while also greatly expanding the range of options players reasonably have access to at any given time by making the time investment needed to use any individual pokemon significantly lower. Even when not playing a nuzlocke explicitly, players are expected to constantly be shuffling their party of pokemon, rather than playing with a consistent team of ~6 and adapting them to fit each new situation. I don't think this is a revolutionary framework to think of this game in but it is important because I don't think the strategy games and the RPGs can be designed for difficulty in anywhere near the same ways.
My current unpopular opinion is that the worldbuilding Pokémon has been doing during the Switch era is pretty terrible.
More specifically, certain story choices like the Gym Challenge, the Treasure Hunt and the urban redevelopment project feel like the series is constantly trying to justify its own setting and it comes off as really insecure. Like, the premise of Pokémon is pretty flimsy as it is, do we really have to spend 2 real life hours on an introduction explaining why it makes perfect sense that these kids aren't in school, actually? This is only my take on it, but all you really need is an NPC talking about how they're excited for summer vacation. Boom, done, let's go pokémoning.
At worst, decisions like these actually hurt the believability of the settings, because now we actually have One School and the Pokémon League being responsible for the entire region. Or how Lumiose City now has wealth inequality and multiple people talk about how having fire-breathing dragons living in front of your house would suck, actually!
With a setting like this, you can either handwave certain worldbuilding elements because you're experiencing the world through the eyes of a child, or you could lean into the fact that this is un unrealistic solarpunk utopia and have fun with the locations.
(For the record, I think "worldbuilding" in the sense of "this character knows this other character" is generally fine)
fwiw the bit with Lumiose City having wealth inequality isn't even a new Z-A inclusion, it's fairly prominent in the original XY, the game just does a terrible job at showing it(the infamous blackout/blocked roads in the original XY, anyone?) unless you engage with side content that most people never even see lol. I agree on other parts though since it feels like the games are trying to ground themselves more but refuse to actually do so in a way that blends well with the unrealistic nature of Pokemon as a fundamental world concept lol.
Run & Bun is accurately described here when played as an RPG. It's miserable. But it's obviously not how the game is designed to be interfaced with - Run & Bun is a strategy game
...all your post was basically confirming what I said, that within the confines of a turn based RPG, you can't design a hard game. You have to tap into other genres. And I really like your comparison to a strategy game, I think it fits my thoughts perfectly.
At worst, decisions like these actually hurt the believability of the settings, because now we actually have One School and the Pokémon League being responsible for the entire region. Or how Lumiose City now has wealth inequality and multiple people talk about how having fire-breathing dragons living in front of your house would suck, actually!
from my perspective, growing wealth inequality and a steadily worsening global economy is actually a thing they've been subtly working into mons worldbuilding for a while now. there's a lot of dialogue drops in alola's battle tree about people being homeless or underpaid or whatnot. galar has one megacorporation running everything and seems like it would've been about 3 bad months away from full-on neofeudalism if the guy in charge of said megacorporation wasn't the biggest fucking idiot in the entire canon. paldea's clearly struggling economy is backed by a cryptocurrency pegged to the pokedollar whose supply is directly controlled by the pokemon league, and still things are barely afloat—the league is understaffed as hell to the point where they have to poach a gym leader to pull double duty as an elite four member. social trust has eroded so much that trainers don't even challenge each other to battle upon eye contact anymore, and people keep their doors locked instead of inviting any old stranger into their homes and striking them up for a friendly chat. maybe the massive world-endangering crises that pop up every couple years are getting to everyone. i'm not sure how much of this was done on purpose, how much is an unintentional reflection of real-world societal decline, or how much is just me reading way too much into arbitrary choices (this is probably 100% of it), but whatever the reason, shit is fucked in pokemon world. but i do agree with you that it isn't believable at all because you can make a living by picking up mushrooms and feathers off the ground and selling them at your nearest free healthcare center
from my perspective, growing wealth inequality and a steadily worsening global economy is actually a thing they've been subtly working into mons worldbuilding for a while now. there's a lot of dialogue drops in alola's battle tree about people being homeless or underpaid or whatnot. galar has one megacorporation running everything and seems like it would've been about 3 bad months away from full-on neofeudalism if the guy in charge of said megacorporation wasn't the biggest fucking idiot in the entire canon. paldea's clearly struggling economy is backed by a cryptocurrency pegged to the pokedollar whose supply is directly controlled by the pokemon league, and still things are barely afloat—the league is understaffed as hell to the point where they have to poach a gym leader to pull double duty as an elite four member. social trust has eroded so much that trainers don't even challenge each other to battle upon eye contact anymore, and people keep their doors locked instead of inviting any old stranger into their homes and striking them up for a friendly chat. maybe the massive world-endangering crises that pop up every couple years are getting to everyone. i'm not sure how much of this was done on purpose, how much is an unintentional reflection of real-world societal decline, or how much is just me reading way too much into arbitrary choices (this is probably 100% of it), but whatever the reason, shit is fucked in pokemon world. but i do agree with you that it isn't believable at all because you can make a living by picking up mushrooms and feathers off the ground and selling them at your nearest free healthcare center
i'd imagine its a combination of all three lol. i imagine there has to be a decent amount of gameplay/story segregation, especially given how you have stuff like lida struggling to afford a water stone for $3000 poke but you the player can easily do so within an hour or two of starting the game without going even going too far with this.
kinda ties into a broader issue with the series where convenience for the player has massively, massively erroded interesting game design elements/world building; a relevant case being said water stone itself. stone evolutions were designed to reward you for waiting, getting some extra good moves and then evolving your pokemon, or taking the punishment and getting immediate stats. but now with how easy to get they are relative to the point in the game you get the pokemon they apply to, and how the modern move relearner lets you get -everything those pokemon learn-, you can basically get a full power arcanine as soon as you start SV with 0 reprecussions.
More specifically, certain story choices like the Gym Challenge, the Treasure Hunt and the urban redevelopment project feel like the series is constantly trying to justify its own setting and it comes off as really insecure. Like, the premise of Pokémon is pretty flimsy as it is, do we really have to spend 2 real life hours on an introduction explaining why it makes perfect sense that these kids aren't in school, actually? This is only my take on it, but all you really need is an NPC talking about how they're excited for summer vacation. Boom, done, let's go pokémoning.
To me this doesn’t really seem “insecure”; it seems like they’re actively taking advantage of the fact that the Pokémon world is not our world and is thus not bound to our logic. Granted, not to the point of a full solarpunk utopia, but still.
The Treasure Hunt is not something that would ever happen in real life because that’s just not the kind of scholastic infrastructure that exists anywhere (to my knowledge, anyway), but we can do it in the Pokémon world because this is a setting where children regularly go off on their own to explore the wilderness with their magical pets to protect them. I don’t think the point is to make that setting feel more justified — I think it’s the other way around. The setting justifies the unrealistic concept that GF want to explore, and they want to explore it because they like the T H E M E S it presents.
The urban redevelopment plan is similar. The fact that anyone could even think “Well we could put up a wall so that the fire-breathing lions all stay in the park…?” is so patently absurd on the face of it that it could only ever have a possibility of working out in a reasonable fashion in the Pokémon world. Doesn’t mean there aren’t gonna be some growing pains for the citizenry, but we know Pokémon is so fundamentally optimistic about the prospects of harmony and understanding that it’s most likely going to be fine in the long run.
i'd imagine its a combination of all three lol. i imagine there has to be a decent amount of gameplay/story segregation, especially given how you have stuff like lida struggling to afford a water stone for $3000 poke but you the player can easily do so within an hour or two of starting the game without going even going too far with this.
fwiw the Poké currency is equivalent to Japanese yen so a 3000 Poké Water Stone is effectively worth $30 USD or so. Far more realistic for a person who is good at battling to pick up quickly while still making sense as to why someone can't afford that price if really tight on cash.
To me this doesn’t really seem “insecure”; it seems like they’re actively taking advantage of the fact that the Pokémon world is not our world and is thus not bound to our logic. Granted, not to the point of a full solarpunk utopia, but still.
The Treasure Hunt is not something that would ever happen in real life because that’s just not the kind of scholastic infrastructure that exists anywhere (to my knowledge, anyway), but we can do it in the Pokémon world because this is a setting where children regularly go off on their own to explore the wilderness with their magical pets to protect them. I don’t think the point is to make that setting feel more justified — I think it’s the other way around. The setting justifies the unrealistic concept that GF want to explore, and they want to explore it because they like the T H E M E S it presents.
The urban redevelopment plan is similar. The fact that anyone could even think “Well we could put up a wall so that the fire-breathing lions all stay in the park…?” is so patently absurd on the face of it that it could only ever have a possibility of working out in a reasonable fashion in the Pokémon world. Doesn’t mean there aren’t gonna be some growing pains for the citizenry, but we know Pokémon is so fundamentally optimistic about the prospects of harmony and understanding that it’s most likely going to be fine in the long run.
Just to clarify, I don't dislike those ideas because they're unrealistic. I just think the power fantasy that Pokémon provides is appealing enough to children that the extra scaffolding is unnecessary.
If anything, I'd say it's a fault with later games that don't have enough to explore that earlier ones set the bar high. SwSh got rightfully shat on because all of Galar's routes are corridors with barely any side paths, which is one reason I've so little interest in them.
As for your opinion... Yeah, I just wanted more stuff out of that exploration. Especially TMs and good Johto mons. I'm greedy!
By HGSS, they really should've spicied it up with more TMs, held items and berries instead of locking interesting ones behind the Goldenrod Mart lotto. Even in GSC, the evo stones could've used more love. Those would be pretty neat rewards for exploration.
With that said, they really went out of their way to cram little rewards everywhere in Johto and it makes the region so much better for it.
That's... not quite correct. In fact, half of Johto's leaders rely on grade A tomfoolery.
Falkner - Accuracy cheese with Mud-Slap, remember, Rock Throw has 90% accuracy, welcome to the casino.
Whitney - Metronome? Stomp flinching? Praying for Rollout misses before you get swept? Roll the dice, baby!
Morty - Hypnosis, let it ride!
Chuck - Hypnosis AND Dynamicpunch, flip some coins!
They really love to drop players straight into Gacha Hell in Johto.
Verlisify is usually right when it comes to genning in VGC.
Yeah... Wild take... But hear me out.
Verlis actually has genuine evidence to back up (most of) his accusations, and often cites the rulebook and other confirmations from TPCi (such as using genned mons for breeding as forbidden) or datamined teams from Kaphotics. The problem is that he is such a narcissistic asshole, which ends up poisoning the well for actually calling this type of stuff out.
That being said, I really don't care if you gen or not, and I will still be watching top creators like Wolfey or Aaron regardless if they have used genned mons or not. Play how you wish to play.
my opinion on genning is that it was fine all those years ago when you needed to sink a genuinely significant amount of time and energy into getting competitively ready mons. not everyone had the kind of time necessary to keep up a daily life schedule while also keeping up with a changing on-cartridge meta when you needed to actually breed for ivs and natures and egg moves and what have you (or worse, soft reset), and then you had to actually ev-train them and level them through grinding because rare candies and vitamins were highly limited resources. if you wanted your mon in an apriball for aesthetics, tough shit, you got like 1 per save file or had to transfer them all the way from gen 4. if you trained up a good mon but then needed a different set with a different nature because the meta was different from how it had been a month ago, fuck you, back to the daycare. in those days, there was no shame in cutting out the middleman and spinning up a set of battle-ready mons as long as they were legal
now, though? now we have hyper training, we have nature mints, vitamins are easily accessible and the cap on them was removed, you can put egg moves on whatever through mirror herb, the game hands out exp like candy (literally like candy, they just give you shitloads of actual candy), repeatable apriball methods are becoming steadily less of a pain in the ass every game, even the shiny rates have been jacked up like crazy. it's a very, very simple matter now to shiny hunt a mon in whatever ball you feel like in a matter of hours (if you're even interested in shinies at all), then shape it into a fully battle-ready fighting machine in like 2 minutes and re-customize the set as needed to accommodate for meta shifts. so if someone is still genning in this day and age, i feel like it has to be either very profound laziness or a pathological need for instant gratification. no way is someone too busy to fast travel to wherever, grab a couple instances of a mon, and cram them full of steroids until they have as many different sets as they need on demand
I mean, the genning process likely takes nonzero effort beyond "make team in teambuilder," so if the QoL on making teams was actually that good the lazy option would be to do it legit. But between a lot of relevant legendaires being slow to reset because of cutscenes (and inherently being one-offs: the games do not want you to have both versions of Urshifu readily available), an absent method for 0IVs in Attack and Speed (for a format where Trick Room is extremely relevant) and the massive backslide of current TM acquisition, I don't think it is there. Hopefully Champions will address these issues.
It's potentially also worth noting that while the games do hand you a lot of money, it is ultimately finite without grinding so someone that goes through a lot of teams will probably run out at some point and need to do something pretty tedious (for them) to get it back.
teambuilding in game is still annoying as fuck because they keep giving qol to the same 3 things (we dont need five billion methods to get evs man its fine. its fine the vitamin cap was enough ITS FINE. ITS FINE) while refusing to address the elephant in the room that is needing multiple games for legendaries, inability to customize ivs beyond maxing them out and the awful disgraceful grind to actually get those items. scarvio is the worst with their dogshit crafting method and a painfully bad money grind.
also you guys keep acting like a vgc player only needs to make 6 pokemon and theyre set for life, when most of them have boxes full of various sets, not even including the outdated and failed ones, all of which need their own grind.
if someone is still genning in this day and age, i feel like it has to be either very profound laziness or a pathological need for instant gratification
this is so funny to say as a smogon player. showdown was literally made for instant gratification aka not having to gaf abt in game team building ever and just creating pokemon out of thin air in 5 minutes
this is so funny to say as a smogon player. showdown was literally made for instant gratification aka not having to gaf abt in game team building ever and just creating pokemon out of thin air in 5 minutes
simulator-based online competitive play actually predates cartridge-based online competitive play. netbattle was a thing in gen 3, before wifi came to nintendo handhelds. showdown was made not as some sort of new instant-gratification alternative to cartridge play but as a continuation of a long line of simulators that began by necessity
In addition, genning a team vs spending the time to manually build a team 99.99% of the time doesn’t end up with a greater advantage outside of the time testing the Mon out.
So in the end, it doesn’t really matter for so many people, you put them side by side and nobody would be able to tell the difference
simulator-based online competitive play actually predates cartridge-based online competitive play. netbattle was a thing in gen 3, before wifi came to nintendo handhelds. showdown was made not as some sort of new instant-gratification alternative to cartridge play but as a continuation of a long line of simulators that began by necessity
showdown was made in 2011 where it was 100% not a necessity. you could have played it online like everyone else, but it sucked ass so people wanted a version that didnt suck ass. and lets not be coy here: most people arent playing showdown because it was "necessary", they play showdown because they dont want to interact with the games teambuilding and just want to play quick, instant matches. If you made a poll on ou forums where it goes "if they removed the time limit from matches, would you play cartidge singles?" and the poll results would be around a 80% "no, why lol"
showdown was made in 2011 where it was 100% not a necessity. you could have played it online like everyone else, but it sucked ass so people wanted a version that didnt suck ass. and lets not be coy here: most people arent playing showdown because it was "necessary", they play showdown because they dont want to interact with the games teambuilding and just want to play quick, instant matches. If you made a poll on ou forums where it goes "if they removed the time limit from matches, would you play cartidge singles?" and the poll results would be around a 80% "no, why lol"
I see genning as just another reason why pokemons casual and competitve side should be kept completely seperate, I like pokemon more when it wants to be a simple casual RPG, i also like pokemon more when it wants to be a very indepth competitive game, i DONT like it when it tries being both because it pulls it off as well as sticking a round peg in a square hole.
It just adds unnessecary stress on the games as now it has to appease two different players whos need often conflict with not only each other but also how gamefreak wants to develop the games themselves.
