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Little things you like about Pokémon

RocketSurgery said:
I really don't need another overpowered Pikachu unit, but how can you not pull for this?

Too bad they didn't/couldn't go all in on the bit and make Red himself gameboy-grey as well. :P
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Check his EX Color Scheme, they did do something cool with that
 

Little detail I like is that leitmotif at the start, which is shared with Blueberry Academy students, is only present in Kieran's 1st battle theme and absent in the next ones, signaling how Kieran's rivalry is becoming less "outsider beef" and getting more personal with the player. Also minor nitpick, Kieran should've returned to this theme for the optional rematches, instead it uses his 2nd battle theme.
 
Just finished replaying Sun, and a really cute detail I never noticed before.

When Lillie is leaving for Kanto in Sun/Moon after you beat the Champion, she leaves you with the parting gift of a Poke Doll, mentioning that it was the doll that she had as a little girl. The Poke Doll is of a Clefairy. In Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon, what Pokemon does Lillie use when she battles alongside you in Episode RR? Clefairy.

In addition, this Poke Doll is the only one in the entire game - Sun/Moon are the only games in the series where it is a finite item. As well, in the Ultra versions where Lillie doesn't leave, it is totally unobtainable without trading it in from Sun/Moon because she never gives it to you.
 
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SwampySwampert said:
In addition, this Poke Doll is the only one in the entire game - Sun/Moon are the only games in the series where it is a finite item. As well, in the Ultra versions where Lillie doesn't leave, it is totally unobtainable without trading it in from Sun/Moon because she never gives it to you.
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Kinda makes you wonder why they didn’t just make a separate “Lillie’s Poké Doll” key item. A “You beat the game!” token key item wouldn’t be anything they hadn’t done before (cf. Honor of Kalos), and it would 1) allow them to have infinite Poké Dolls for the player to use without 2) risking accidentally using the one Lillie gave you. (Although in practice, I think I prefer that it’s just a regular item, because I was able to give it to Nebby as a held item. And, granted, I don’t imagine that Poké Dolls are something most players use frequently anyway, I just think it’s interesting that they enforced an artificial scarcity for this one example.)
 
mertyville said:
The fact that Slowking learns the move Chilly Reception. I see many refering to it being a move that you can only understand if you are Japanese but I think the move was inspired by that 'I could use pants' scene with Slowking from Pokemon Movie 2 where it happened to slow.
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Coincidentally enough, the 2nd Movie's Slowking is the reason why Slowking gets Chilly Reception, but not because of that joke (which I believe was only in the English version): Slowking was voiced by a famous Japanese comedian named Masatoshi Hamada. I'm not sure if his style of comedy matches the Move, but from what I read of his wikipedia page he was (at least partly) the comical type that made fun of himself. Infact one of his famous running gags, being a bad drawer, was brought over to Slowking via him illustrating a Slowking card.

SwampySwampert said:
When Lillie is leaving for Kanto in Sun/Moon after you beat the Champion, she leaves you with the parting gift of a Poke Doll, mentioning that it was the doll that she had as a little girl. The Poke Doll is of a Clefairy. In Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon, what Pokemon does Lillie use when she battles alongside you in Episode RR? Clefairy.

In addition, this Poke Doll is the only one in the entire game - Sun/Moon are the only games in the series where it is a finite item. As well, in the Ultra versions where Lillie doesn't leave, it is totally unobtainable without trading because she never gives it to you.
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Lillie's association with Clefairy goes even a bit further with Lusamine owning a Clefable which, throughout the various media, been given an expanded role compared to Lusamine's other Pokemon (though it's never been implied Lillie's Clefairy is the child of Lusamine's Clefable).

As for the Poke Doll, that's a sweet detail (which kind of makes it awkward it's a one-use item, maybe for Gen VII they should have made it a Key Item). While escaping from a battle was never a problem, interesting to still see what they did for "escaping items" with them wanting to make the Poke Doll one-of-a-kind. If you're just playing through the main game of Sun & Moon the first and possibly only one you'll get is the Smoke Ball all the way in Po Town, better late than never I suppose (though you do need to have a Pokemon holding it to use it, but at least it's not one-use). However if you get the Battle Store in Festival Plaza you can buy 4 Poke Toys via the "Toy Set" which costs 10 FC. In Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon they must have decided escaping wasn't easy enough so they added Poke Toys to the Poke Marts after completing the first Trial for 100 P. They also added ways to get extra Smoke Balls, one finite way in Seafolk Village via showing a woman the Totem Salazzle, and one infinite way via farming them off Salandits and Salazzles. The Poke Toy becoming a "common" item in all Poke Marts was actually pretty significant, as in SwSh & SV all Poke Marts (and other similar shopping locations) carry Poke Dolls (whereas previously, for any of the escape items aside from the Smoke Ball, most of the time you'd have to go to that game's department store).
 
The episode is the 108th episode of SM, Memories in the Mist! This is the same goofy haha series that has Rowlet breaking the fourth wall by landing on the camera lens.
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Seriously though, what a DCAU-level tear jerker. 10/10, no notes
 
Esserise said:
Kinda makes you wonder why they didn’t just make a separate “Lillie’s Poké Doll” key item. A “You beat the game!” token key item wouldn’t be anything they hadn’t done before (cf. Honor of Kalos), and it would 1) allow them to have infinite Poké Dolls for the player to use without 2) risking accidentally using the one Lillie gave you. (Although in practice, I think I prefer that it’s just a regular item, because I was able to give it to Nebby as a held item. And, granted, I don’t imagine that Poké Dolls are something most players use frequently anyway, I just think it’s interesting that they enforced an artificial scarcity for this one example.)
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Can confirm, been playing for over 25 years and have never used a Poke Doll or any other escape item. Though I did read about it being able to be used to skip a certain Gen 1 plot point, so maybe I’ll use it in a playthrough of that at some point.
 
Coronis said:
Can confirm, been playing for over 25 years and have never used a Poke Doll or any other escape item. Though I did read about it being able to be used to skip a certain Gen 1 plot point, so maybe I’ll use it in a playthrough of that at some point.
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I don’t think I ever used one either, at least until SwSh and SV, where I find that there’s a brief window in the early game in which they are actually useful for running away from high-level Pokémon you might accidentally bump into in the open areas (especially if you decide to mess around in the Tundra/Terarium right away).
 
Felt like this warranted its own post instead of tacking it onto that reply:

Obviously the more hands-on presence of Game Freak is the major factor here, but I like how, since unlike most other spin-offs, Pokopia actually takes place in a main series region, it tries to hew much closer to the established aesthetics and logics of the main series. A lot of the classic fanfares and sound cues are there, the Mystery Gift feature and its corresponding music are there, tons of held items from the main series appear as relics, Pokémon Centers and PCs serve as the main hubs for the player, route gates are used for dividing up the map, and you have things like Leppa Berries being the first food source you’re introduced to for restoring PP. And when you’re about to meet a new Pokémon, even the grass shakes three times first as sort of an inverse of how a Poké Ball shakes three times before a successful catch.

I also really, really adore the choice to use Ditto as a mascot and main character for the game. In the main series games, it’s always been a very gimmicky Pokémon that I’ve never given any real thought to using outside of breeding. But in the context of a game like Pokopia, it’s pretty much the perfect choice to facilitate very versatile gameplay mechanics, as it’s a Pokémon that can pretty much be whatever it wants to as long as it has something to mimic. The choice of Pokémon and moves that form the array of utilities available to Ditto feels very cleverly chosen all around. Like Rototiller, of all things! Stockpile and Spit Out to store and place blocks! And I love how Ditto’s blobby nature is also expressed in instances like being able to squeeze through one-block spaces or shrug off drops that would logically result in fall damage.

Not only that, but Ditto is also perfectly emblematic of the nature and essence of the game itself, as a free-form sandbox building game. Shape the world however you want, while playing as a Pokémon that can shape itself however it wants. That’s just good, cohesive theming right there.
 
A little interesting thing that I find a bit cool is that Winds and Waves isn't using a variation of "red and blue" in terms of its color theming between its two versions. Waves is using blue, since waves are associated with water, but Winds is using a variant of green, which hasn't been used in any paired versions since Red and Green and their remakes FRLG (and even then Gen 1 internationally outside Japan is Red and Blue).

Even games like Gold and Silver and Black and White still have it present to some degree within their mascot designs, even if the games themselves use their titular color scheme. Ho-oh has shades of red in its design and Lugia has shades of blue in addition to gold and silver, and Reshiram and Zekrom have both red and blue present in opposite places (their eyes versus their tail lights). Ruby and Sapphire are red and blue, Diamond and Pearl are also a variant of blue-ish and red-ish respectively: Pearl is more pink per se but that's red-adjacent. X and Y are blue and red respectively, same with Sword and Shield. Sun and Moon use orange and a dark purple, which is also the case with Scarlet and Violet, but they use colors close to the red and blue dichotomy.

Green has only ever been used once in the traditional paired versions, with the first games in their original Japanese iterations (Red and Green) and their universal titles of their remakes (FireRed and LeafGreen). Green has otherwise mainly been used Emerald, a third version, and Legends: Z-A, a Legends style revisit of Kalos, both of which star a third legendary (Rayquaza and Zygarde).

So for green to be used again, and this time green and blue as opposed to red and green, with Winds and Waves, is kind of an interesting deviation from what they usually did before.
 
Esserise said:
Felt like this warranted its own post instead of tacking it onto that reply:

Obviously the more hands-on presence of Game Freak is the major factor here, but I like how, since unlike most other spin-offs, Pokopia actually takes place in a main series region, it tries to hew much closer to the established aesthetics and logics of the main series. A lot of the classic fanfares and sound cues are there, the Mystery Gift feature and its corresponding music are there, tons of held items from the main series appear as relics, Pokémon Centers and PCs serve as the main hubs for the player, route gates are used for dividing up the map, and you have things like Leppa Berries being the first food source you’re introduced to for restoring PP. And when you’re about to meet a new Pokémon, even the grass shakes three times first as sort of an inverse of how a Poké Ball shakes three times before a successful catch.

I also really, really adore the choice to use Ditto as a mascot and main character for the game. In the main series games, it’s always been a very gimmicky Pokémon that I’ve never given any real thought to using outside of breeding. But in the context of a game like Pokopia, it’s pretty much the perfect choice to facilitate very versatile gameplay mechanics, as it’s a Pokémon that can pretty much be whatever it wants to as long as it has something to mimic. The choice of Pokémon and moves that form the array of utilities available to Ditto feels very cleverly chosen all around. Like Rototiller, of all things! Stockpile and Spit Out to store and place blocks! And I love how Ditto’s blobby nature is also expressed in instances like being able to squeeze through one-block spaces or shrug off drops that would logically result in fall damage.

Not only that, but Ditto is also perfectly emblematic of the nature and essence of the game itself, as a free-form sandbox building game. Shape the world however you want, while playing as a Pokémon that can shape itself however it wants. That’s just good, cohesive theming right there.
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I was thinking about it and I kind of like how this applies to the Pokemon themselves

Namely: they all kind of feel like weird dogs

In the anime, mangas and so on they trend to only be treated like animals if it services a logical demand (they're animals so obviously they all eat from dog bowls and often sleep on the floor even if they're a walking mime) or a plot demand (any time there's a wild Pokemon in need of care or they need to be more unknowable) and are otherwise treated like people. Which is fine. These are often central characters, so you need them to be more anthropomorphic. But the games uuuuusually trend towards treating them like really weird pets. Some are smart, some are less so.
So you get Pokopia which has all of them talk and they all feel like if slightly-smarter-dogs and cats could talk. They don't get anything that's going on, they like just hanging around dirt or a favorite item, they don't understand how anything works and even the smartest of the regular bunch can only remember how to create elevators can't tell you what anything it recognizes does or understand human speech or read. Tinkamaster is probably the most capable of the regular cast and most of that is built on being a critter that builds things as part of its nature and still has big gaps. The legends seem to be a tier above everyone else just in terms of how they speak & what they know, which also usually carries on from the games, but even then.

it's interesting!
 
I think one thing that may not have been said before is the relative uniqueness of Pokemon's dungeons and dungeon themes. I'm a huge JRPG fan, and some of my favorites are ff6, ff7, ffx, dq3 and 4, phantasy star iv... and yet all of these don't feel like they've captured the uniqueness of pokemon's dungeons (except maybe ff6 and psiv). pokemon's choice of a more modern setting, and its willingness to use more modern dungeon themes, is something I wish i saw more of. it's one thing that i think it does better than most JRPGs.
 
Juggling playthroughs of Colosseum on original hardware and XD: Gale of Darkness on Switch 2.

Something cool I noticed and wasn't expecting in XD is that checking moves in the status screen actually shows you a little graph with type effectiveness.

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XD: Gale of Darkness overall has a lot of QoL improvements over its predecessor, but this one in particular is extremely forward thinking. I'm pretty sure it took until Gen 7 for the mainline games to implement something similar.
 
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Karxrida said:
Juggling playthroughs of Colosseum on original hardware and XD: Gale of Darkness on Switch 2.

Something cool I noticed and wasn't expecting in XD is that checking moves in the status screen actually shows you a little graph with type effectiveness.

View attachment 817437

XD: Gale of Darkness overall has a lot of QoL improvements over its predecessor, but this one in particular is extremely forward thinking. I'm pretty sure it took until Gen 7 for the mainline games to implement something similar.
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Oh damn thats out now? Gotta get on it.
 
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