Agreed. The script has flipped so fast it's actually wild. But I think anger towards modern Pokémon has also just been snowballing since Sword and Shield in 2019 (which was already the result of snowballing anger from gen 7 and some of gen 6).
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
I just started a new save on Y as part of my ‘playthrough every game before Winds and Waves’ series (and yes, I did start before I knew they weren’t coming until November 2027 so I am well ahead of schedule) so I will see if my opinion changes at all on this playthrough! I’m going to rock a team of Raichu and all the Pikaclones up to Gen 6 because I’ve never used Plusle, Minun or Dedenne and I figured that might make the games a bit of a challenge? We’ll see!
I think what frustrates me the most with X/Y is that the section from the start up until Gym 3 is so good but then, in my opinion it just falls off a cliff completely after Korrina. Like, Reflection Cave is honestly one of the toughest dungeons in all of Pokemon, especially during a Nuzlocke. That trainer with a Throh and a Hawlucha (pet peeve here but why is a random trainer using the next Gym Leader’s ace?!) is no joke as well as the one with Absol and Pinsir and all the wild Shadow Tag Wobbuffet. However, after that I just find the game gets so much easier. I’d probably rank Valerie, Olivia and Wulfric as three of the worst Gym Leaders in the whole series to the point where I can’t really remember what their teams are off the top of my head. Wulfric especially is a complete joke.
On the topic of Pokemon distribution, I think Black and White hit the right sweet spot for me. I like having new stuff to encounter on each route but I also think evolutions of earlier Pokemon should show up in the wilds, just to give the player that sense of progression more than anything and make the world feel more alive. Just looking at X/Y you have Pidgey, Fletchling, Zigzagoon and Scatterbug all on Route 2 (Route 1 really, lol) where you don’t encounter their evolutions in the wild at all outside of the Friend Safari and even then, the three Pokemon on Route 2 where you can find their evolutions in the wild are Bunnelby (Diggersby is in an optional area only accessible after you get Waterfall) and Caterpie/Weedle (their middle stages are encounterable immediately in the next area dependent on version).
RSE and DPPt are the other end of the extreme, DP especially, where there is basically no new encounters in the late game and it becomes very stale very quickly. This is all kind of moot now we’re in the open world, overworld encounter era but I did think Scarlet and Violet did a great job of having a big Pokédex but making the encounters feel very natural.
look "can you find a mon that learns flamethrower" is a tricky skill check okay
Seems you didn't even remember their names correctly either.
I largely agree with this thought about XY, it's pretty reasonable for the first 3 gyms to be about 50% of your play time from start to credits.
I'm also kinda glad people are coming around the to idea that a ~200-250 mon regional pokedex size ends up being a best fit for ingame. With SuMo and beyond it became clear that a significant part of regional Pokedex decisions started to interact more with a mind for designing whitelists for that year's VGC* rather than doing any kind of precise ingame balance tinkering, so in that regard it makes sense to balloon numbers. But for the sake of the games themselves you don't really need that many.
*Example thought about this - SuMo specifically introduced a new cast of weather ability Pokemon. Politoed, Kanto Ninetales, Tyranitar, and Abomasnow were not in the SuMo dex, and each of Pelipper, Torkoal, and Gigalith were retroactively given weather setting while Alolan Ninetales was introduced period. From SuMo onward, no game has ever had a regional dex that didn't include at least one Pokemon capable of setting each weather through an ability.
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Oops
Genuinely just had to look it up because even after knowing I’d gotten it wrong I still couldn’t remember it.
I agree with you about the regional Pokédex, although I think Dexit has also led to a necessity for 400+ regional dexes just to ensure that enough Pokemon are making it into the game. Of course, you could go the Gen IV and V route of having 300+ Pokemon be post-game exclusive but I don’t know how well received that would be in a post-Dexit world.
The sweet spot is definitely about that 200-250 mark though. Just enough for variety but still gives each individual Pokemon some room to shine.
And tangentially on the weather setters, please GameFreak, give something else Drizzle or included Politoed instead of Pelipper for once. It’s literally been in every regional dex (not including Legends games) since its introduction bar BW Unova and is already confirmed for WiWa. I know that gulls are obviously a very common bird worldwide and it makes sense for it to be in every region thematically but when Pokédex space is limited I’m sick of it taking two up every single gen.
Actually that vgc point is something that's weighed on me as part of why I think the anger towards newer games has snowballed the way it has. It feels like VGC gets more and more of an emphasis in design with each generation, and I frankly do believe it comes at the expense of the actual focus on the region and in-game quality. Pelipper is a fair example, but then it also feels like the overtuned VGC mons are going to make it in every time, that moves and mechanics are designed more with VGC spectacle than with being more interesting for the game as time goes on, and how it's made so easy to raise mons for VGC that it kind of breaks in-game even more than it already was. Pokemon isn't a terribly hard series but its certainly easier when you can quite easily, and pretty early on too, optimize your Pokemon's stats, moves, and even nature to ridiculous levels. It also feels like the power creep we see now is so obviously tuned for VGC in mind that it almost feels like the Pokemon do not matter beyond VGC. I get I'm on a competitive Pokemon website but like... for once can GF think of non-competitive again over esports please lol. Like its hard to not feel like the in game is neglected when the signs of effort being there but put elsewhere are present, and that adds to the sentiment a lot.
On the pelipper note, I also really just never want to see incineroar again. Between Smash, VGC, and the anime like... can we get a generation without this mon PLEASE lol.
me when I pick a grass starter and somehow have the easiest time with it than everyone else because of the free charmander AND lucario lmao
i do agree the later half of xy feels unfinished, which is really unfortunate since it looked to have been shaping up for a very cool time. I still wish Pokemon Z had come out.
I do also think that its because the Switch 2 has settled in gently enough. There was no real boycott and it sells out constantly, and the last remaining time of Switch 1 focuses kept people happy enough. Also yeah, Nintendo being relatively stable in a very unstable time period I think is something anyone would come to appreciate. When prices drop I do see it beginning to really take off. (not to shill for nintendo here, i do not like a lot of this direction. if anything it makes me sad that there wasn't much real resistance)
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Speaking of which...
Archaludon is an abomination. Both balance-wise and design-wise. Why tf is a whole bridge this small!?
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I think S/V was slightly better for it but SwSh felt like a VGC game with a campaign slapped on it at times, especially with how rushed the final third of the game was.
You’d think with Champions now existing we might get more single-played focused games going forward but looks like Winds and Waves has yet another new battle gimmick so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
We'll see how people feel when WiWa drop a year from now. I think if the graphics continue to look as good as they do in the reveal trailer (if not better) + good performance then people will probably be pretty happy with the games at launch. If it's $80 physical, then idk. And if there's still no voice acting, people will absolutely raise hell about that. I don't think it's as big of a deal as others, in fact I think voice acting will probably suck if they add it given most other Nintendo titles, but WiWa not having it will only make people scream louder for it. I've already decided to retire from the mainstream online Pokémon community, and I think you can tell why from how I sound here lol.
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ngl i kind of like how it seems more like a model bridge than an actual one, like something I'd find in a museum. But yeah its just. really overtuned, and I also don't really like how it's an evolution of Duraludon. Let mediocre mons without evolutions exist in peace! Druddigon wasn't a bad thing!
SwSh was especially egregious to me yeah. Dynamax as a whole feels like it was made for esports spectacle, and Tera is a bit better with it but its still just not too fun.
I think Champions is their way of measuring how such a thing could work, I have no doubt that the results of champions launch had some impact on the dev cycle of winds/waves.
The XY gym leaders are wild. WHY ONLY 3 MONS? Many of the other decisions in those gyms are good, but there's no reason for a gym past 3 to be running fewer than 4 mons, and the E4 should have full teams.
Viola I would argue is poorly designed. Inverting type matchups in gym battles is good, but I specifically think that should be avoided in gym 1. Gym 1 should involve NOTHING clever. She is a reasonable challenge, which is shocking and laudable from both a 1st gym and a bug gym, but this is someone's first gym, act like it.
Roark is pretty tough. Rock/Dragon to prevent the auto-lose to water, Rock/Ice covers some things that resist his STAB, solid stat spreads, but you also have access to plenty of options to beat him...Great gym 2.
Korrina is an embarrassment to the title of Gym Leader and I have no idea who approved any decisions here.
Ramos exists, I guess? You can only do so much with a grass leader, but he at least leans into what the type does well.
Clemont is great design IMO. You encounter him directly after a bunch of ground types become available, and there's plenty of training available for your Gible or Trapinch. And a ground will do well against him, but isn't an auto-win due to Emolga. The only real problem here is that he's Gym Leader 5 and only has 3 mons, which is unacceptable, but I'd still say he's the best-designed Electric specialist in the series. Not from a power perspective, but from an "accomplishes the goal of making sure the player understands the game" angle.
Valerie is actually fine. Mawile ignores Fairy's weaknesses, Mr. Mime sets up screens, and Sylveon sweeps. Good demonstration of the different Fairy-types available, good compensation for their weaknesses. Now if only she had more than 3 mons!
Olympia has reasonably bulky Psychics with support moves and coverage. It's actually close to what I'd do for a Psychic leader in the early-midgame, before you expect a team of 5ish mons.
Wulfric is arguably the worst final leader in series history. Well, that's unfair. He leads with Snow Warning, then has the most specially-bulky and physically-bulky Ice types in the game. IDK if you can improve that. But fundamentally he's an ice-type trainer in the lategame with only 3 mons, there is no way to make that a losable fight.
There are usually actual teams there. There's some element of strategy or intentional design. But they seem to have applied the breaks hard in some areas and they actually come out as incredibly weak teams.
Gym leader that's so forgettable you mix them up with one from a completely different region
What we’re learning from this thread is that no-one remembers the names of the Kalos Gym Leaders
I think Grant in particular just seems to emit a sort of cognition interference because even I, someone who makes it a point to memorize all of this stuff, still get tripped up whenever I try to remember him, all because sometime before his English name was revealed I saw someone somewhere suggest that his name might be Cliff, and I guess that got lodged permanently in my brain because now I always have to stop for a second and go “Wait, was Grant or Cliff the fan-suggested name?” (This issue is probably not helped by him giving out the Cliff Badge.)
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One can hope that Champions existing is in large part meant to mitigate this problem. Obviously we won't know until WiWa actually releases but in theory it should have more freedom to design around a single player experience without having to give the player ways to get borked TMs and mints and such because that is ostensibly Champions' job
The most recent mainline games I've played are SWSH and Legends Arceus so I'm not completely up to date but there felt like a noticeable difference between the two given the latter had no multiplayer battling at all. I distinctly remember getting a Waterfall TR for my Corphish from a raid and a Level 20 Gallade with Brick Break in my first SWSH playthrough from raids and thinking "This is funny but honestly pretty stupid", can't recall LA making me feel that way in the multiple times I've reached end credits. SV seems like it has similar, primarily raid-based balancing problems to SWSH and I don't know the consensus on Z-A's tuning esp given it actually has a pvp mode
I feel like in SV it’s less of a problem because raids don’t just drop whole-ass TRs; any TM you want to make needs a few things: 1) the “recipe” allowing you to make it (which you obtain by either obtaining an existing a copy of the TM, or by clearing Team Star bases/defeating Gym Leaders), 2) the Pokémon materials needed to craft it, and 3) some amount of LP (naturally, better moves cost more).
Technically there’s nothing stopping you from just heading to Cascarrafa right out the gate to go and get the Earthquake TM and then being able to teach it to anything that can learn it, but this is somewhat balanced out by the fact that TM149 (at least prior to the DLC) was only a reward for defeating 5 Trainers in the Asado Desert (where the average Trainer level is 22). So if you want it early you’ve got to deal with fighting 5 Trainers who outlevel you, and even then you’ve got to pay in mats+LP for multiple copies if you want to teach it to more than one Pokémon.
None of this is, strictly speaking, difficult to do if you know what you’re doing — and to some extent I think part of the appeal of an open world is being able to go straight for the busted stuff, as long as it’s guarded by commensurate obstacles, i.e. the Guardians swarming around Hyrule Castle in BOTW — but at the very least I think it suggests an attempt (keyword, as it is still Game Freak) to balance things out a little better than SwSh.
Yeah so SV don't have any sort of friction. You *can* go fight the higher level trainers earlier if you want, which can be its own form of friction, but it's hard to do that in a game where the combat is purely turn-based. That leads into another unpopular opinion of mine about level scaling and the TL;DR of that is that I don't think the lack of trainers scaling their levels to yours is the problem with SV but rather everything surrounding it. Paldea is just not very tightly designed, partly as a result of it being open world but I think mostly because it was a heavily rushed open world game. I'm hoping WiWa is more like the legends games progression-wise where you have a decent amount of freedom but there's still some linear structure to progression.
I think Z-A does a pretty good job with it too. TMs are reusable but you need to actually find them. You can swap moves out on the fly and the game actively encourages you to do so with individual Pokémon regularly. EXP candies are a thing but IIRC you can't abuse them super easily. Nature Mints, Bottle Caps, and vitamins are all present but the main point of friction in the game are the rogue megas which don't solely rely on raising the most jacked team. Adding real time elements really helps give Pokémon games a heightened sense of difficulty, even if only by a little bit.
I have a similar but also nowhere near the same issue with B/W where I played up to the first 2 gyms on a ROM after the Japanese release (please don’t get me Nintendo ninjas, I was 14 and I was impatient waiting for the UK release) but now every time I play through B/W it feels like a fan-game up until the point I get to Skyarrow Bridge.I think Grant in particular just seems to emit a sort of cognition interference because even I, someone who makes it a point to memorize all of this stuff, still get tripped up whenever I try to remember him, all because sometime before his English name was revealed I saw someone somewhere suggest that his name might be Cliff, and I guess that got lodged permanently in my brain because now I always have to stop for a second and go “Wait, was Grant or Cliff the fan-suggested name?” (This issue is probably not helped by him giving out the Cliff Badge.)
Well, like I said: it’s still Game Freak, at the end of the day. Now, I am by no means one of those people who think they’re incompetent developers; I’m perfectly willing to go to bat for their good design choices, which I do think they make plenty of… but boy are those always just one half of a mixed bag. With SV, I like the attempt at putting a few more material restrictions on TMs, but was that attempt a total success? Eh… not quite.
I’ve mentioned it before but I also think it’s a far better showcase for the 3D models. One of the main complaints about them has always been that they are too idle, and I think a lot of that idling owed to them only being animated when using a move, fainting, or playing around in a sub-feature. Whereas being able to actually move about the battlefield along with you makes them feel so much more active and gets mucch more mileage out of each Pokémon’s numerous animations.
Grant is easy to remember for me because he has a Rock Gym with several trainers and none of them have a Geodude.I think Grant in particular just seems to emit a sort of cognition interference because even I, someone who makes it a point to memorize all of this stuff, still get tripped up whenever I try to remember him, all because sometime before his English name was revealed I saw someone somewhere suggest that his name might be Cliff, and I guess that got lodged permanently in my brain because now I always have to stop for a second and go “Wait, was Grant or Cliff the fan-suggested name?” (This issue is probably not helped by him giving out the Cliff Badge.)
Grant's actually very memorable for me in that regard because, yeah, there's the lack of Geodude, but in general, he subverts the usual format and function Rock-type Gym Leaders played in the past. Not only is he the second Gym Leader, rather than the first, but he's not beatable in the same way that Brock, Roxanne, and Roark are. Those Rock-type Gym Leaders are meant to teach the value of Grass/Water STAB over normal-type generic melee attacks, especially in Gen 1, and in Hoenn and Sinnoh, Torchic and Chimchar become part Fighting-type as Combusken and Monferno to give them a fighting chance against Roxanne and Roark. Geodude and Onix fall in one or two Grass or Water attacks and predictably so.
Grant being the second Gym is one thing but he moves away from Rock as an introductory boss type and leans more into its other merits as an actual threat for that point in the game. The Trainers along the way use stuff like Relicanth, Lunatone, and Solrock which are statistically strong for that point. But Grant himself has both fossils which actually both post a decent threat one way or another. Amaura has Aurora Beam and Refrigerate Take Down which can hit Quilladin hard, and Thunder Wave is a neat tool as well. Tyrunt adds to it since being part Dragon means it takes neutral damage from both Grass and Water, and thus Quilladin and Frogadier aren't an instant win ticket like you'd think.
Grant's a really cool early Gym in that regard both because he comes later than usual Rock-type Gyms would and his Gym challenges a lot of preconceived assumptions players would walk into his Gym with, subverting a lot of expectations.
Viola's a pretty acceptable first Gym because Bug is a good introductory type with distinct matchups against the three starters, and Viola does have tools to make Fennekin not such an instant cheese, while Chespin can prove surprisingly effective with Rollout so instead of it being a complete deadweight it can additionally teach the lesson of using type coverage to compensate for a naturally disadvantaged matchup, playing with the lesson a bit while still teaching the lesson Bug as a first boss would teach.
The first three Gyms of XY are actually really neat in a way, the first two for different reasons and Korrina because she's tied to Mega Evolution and that whole chain of events there which makes her memorable.
I do agree that everyone else along the way except Clemont and Valerie kinda don't really stand out though, which is a bit of a shame.
Grant being the second Gym is one thing but he moves away from Rock as an introductory boss type and leans more into its other merits as an actual threat for that point in the game. The Trainers along the way use stuff like Relicanth, Lunatone, and Solrock which are statistically strong for that point. But Grant himself has both fossils which actually both post a decent threat one way or another. Amaura has Aurora Beam and Refrigerate Take Down which can hit Quilladin hard, and Thunder Wave is a neat tool as well. Tyrunt adds to it since being part Dragon means it takes neutral damage from both Grass and Water, and thus Quilladin and Frogadier aren't an instant win ticket like you'd think.
Grant's a really cool early Gym in that regard both because he comes later than usual Rock-type Gyms would and his Gym challenges a lot of preconceived assumptions players would walk into his Gym with, subverting a lot of expectations.
Viola's a pretty acceptable first Gym because Bug is a good introductory type with distinct matchups against the three starters, and Viola does have tools to make Fennekin not such an instant cheese, while Chespin can prove surprisingly effective with Rollout so instead of it being a complete deadweight it can additionally teach the lesson of using type coverage to compensate for a naturally disadvantaged matchup, playing with the lesson a bit while still teaching the lesson Bug as a first boss would teach.
The first three Gyms of XY are actually really neat in a way, the first two for different reasons and Korrina because she's tied to Mega Evolution and that whole chain of events there which makes her memorable.
I do agree that everyone else along the way except Clemont and Valerie kinda don't really stand out though, which is a bit of a shame.
It really is so funny how they genuinely locked in for Cyllage Gym and it's like top 5 gyms in the franchise material and then they just gave up for the rest of the game
honestly the gym leaders feel less involved with the wider world, and also feel like they are given less emphasis as an important role in XY. While SM was the first to do away with the gym system, I'd argue XY is when it began to decline in importance in favor of the rest of the story. It especially is emphasized coming right after Unova, where the gym leaders play debatably the biggest role in the entire series, and also where a lot of the emphasis on non-league story comes in. And yeah, the game as a whole really feels like the second half was just not finished. In all fairness, we do know the game was rushed and it likely was unfinished.
I can concur that SV heavily has that issue with raid-based balancing, because it is still possible to get some pretty dumb stuff through them, though I do not know about SwSh as I did not finish them. SV did seem like it tried to not just let you catch a stupid broken mon and abuse it ASAP... but it didn't make doing so hard enough.
I worry about Champions given its launch, because it seems like it absolutely is necessary if they intend on keeping VGC as big as it is while addressing complaints about in game.
I do agree with this, it does not feel like Paldea as a region has been filled in properly. The emptiness of each route is something that's commonly complained about, and for good reason. It plays far too loosely, but not in an interesting way, just in a "i like snapping the game in half early with zero effort" way, which takes the fun out of it for me.
I'd argue the issue I've seen the most with the 3D models is their lack of overall detail and polish, and their limited animations and expressiveness. Games on similar hardware usually have much more than this, and while I'd argue that Pokemon does struggle with needing more models due to the amount of Pokemon... it's not common for a dev team to have an entire separate company dedicated to the modeling and still turn out this poorly. And frankly, the more action you put those in, the more that becomes apparent. The models would need to have better animations and more detail on them for this approach to work imho. There's a reason Legends Arceus had its biggest backlash about graphics... which is partially that SwSh had *far* bigger fish to fry, but also because at the least you have less exposure to just how poor the aesthetic is.
Mostly agreed. I think this is a problem with Ohmori's games in particular. But it's also a consequence of not giving these games enough dev time to fully polish them. Winds and Waves will definitely be a lot more polished than SV, even if they come with their own litany of issues.
Yeah the 3D models are actually pretty decent and a lot of Pokémon have unique animations that have been present for many of them since gen 6 but just haven't been as visible until now. GF has put in a lot of work remodeling several Pokémon, giving them new poses and animations in the games since SwSh. It's clear they took criticism of that to heart. I don't see enough appreciation for this frankly. People like to share badly cropped and condensed 3DS idle poses to try and illustrate their point that Pokémon should return to 2D (or worse, go HD2D
) and I think there's a lot of nuance they're missing, as usual.Yeah like I just said SV were hella rushed and it shows in more ways than just graphics and performance (on Switch 1 at least).