I see. I don't find this to be boring or a problem. If anything I prefer how Johto balances trainers and resource management. I feel like Kanto throws too many trainers at you, and they're not all super fun either. The trainer teams in Johto at least feel more curated and individual NPCs have full lives and schedules. In most regions I don't remember the names of regular trainers, but I know several of them by name in Johto since the game encourages you to spend more time with them. Tama goes a little more into detail on that in her HGSS video. I know I've said this a few times already- I'm not saying I am completely spineless and letting another person do the thinking for me, I just think she well articulates points I largely agree with.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
I didn’t know about this, never looked into the Teraleak that much. A shame they changed it, I think Sneasel should have been available in the Ice Path in HG/SS, just like in Crystal.
Having to get Pichu through the DNS exploit or injecting it with PkHex means you have to get it through external means, so I don’t really count it as available in Johto. I can accept getting Elekid through the Pokéwalker, though. As for Suicune, I think I used it during one of my playthroughs of Crystal as a kid, and I know for sure that a childhood friend used it on one of his playthroughs. Either way, I think it should have been available before Kanto like in G/S/C, making it Kanto-only feels like a change for the worse.
I don’t mind putting some time and effort into getting a specific Pokémon, but I don’t want to spend too much time on it. I have rarely tried to get a Pokémon with an encounter rate at below 5% in a playthrough, but I if I did, it would just take a lot of time that could be spent on something else. Chances are I would have to spend more time on finding the Pokémon than training it (unless I would get really lucky and find it quickly). And as Karxrida said, many of the Johto Pokémon aren’t really that good, they have either bad movepools, bad stats, or both. Basically, trying to use certain Johto Pokémon in the Johto games is a lose-lose situation, you have to spend a lot of time to find a Pokémon that’s not even good once you get it.
I agree that D/P did a bad job at this as well (though I’m not sure if I would say they were worse than the Johto games). Either way, I can sort of understand what (I think) they were trying to do in D/P. They wanted to showcase most of the new Pokémon during the main game, but “save” many of the new evolutions for the post-game. Though this didn’t really work since the fans didn’t like it, so I’m not surprised they made all non-legendary Sinnoh Pokémon available during the main game in Platinum. Speaking of which, I like how Platinum allowed you to use all the Sinnoh Pokémon that D/P didn’t have during the main game, and I think this is another thing HG/SS failed at. HG/SS didn’t let you get most of the new (Gen 4) evolutions until the post-game, leaving you unable to evolve some Pokémon like Murkrow, Misdreavus and Togetic during Johto. Platinum fixed the problem with the Pokémon availability in D/P, but I think HG/SS failed in this regard. Another thing that annoy me with HG/SS is that they didn’t keep all the changes Crystal made to the Pokémon availability (such as having Sneasel available before Kanto, and making it easier to find some Pokémon like Snubbull).
I don’t recall finding it difficult to find a male Ralts or a female Snorunt in Platinum (I actually used both in one of my playthroughs), and getting Heart Scales for Pokémon like Togekiss was easy too, thanks to the Underground. Spiritomb is a real pain to get, though.
It is, I guess I should have included that, but I was focusing on how you obtain the Pokémon in the wild.
I think this is because B/W has a much better level curve than HG/SS, and the levels for wild Pokémon actually increase in the post-game areas, making it easier to evolve these Pokémon, even if you can’t get them during the main game. IMO, B/W also has a far more engaging and enjoyable post-game than the Johto games since grinding is easier, and I found the western half of Unova to be far more fun to explore than Kanto in the Johto games.
Personally, I would love to see a Johto game that puts a higher focus on the Johto Pokémon and fixes the infamous level curve. Not necessarily a BD/SP-style remake, though. But I think this is getting too close to wishlisting, so I won’t say more about this.
Wow, I really disagree with you here. I think we just have to agree to disagree on this subject, but I want to say a few more things. The RNG aspect of the Vs. Seeker never bothered me that much, and I’ll gladly take it over the PokéGear rematches any day. While you can argue that HG/SS improved upon the rematch system in G/S/C, I don’t think it was enough. I still find it very tedious and inefficient. Having to change the time on your system just to rebattle a specific trainer feels like bad (or at least questionable) game design to me. I know that the daily and weekly events are a part of Johto’s design philosophy, I just don’t think it was particularly well executed.
Your last sentences are definitely true, though. I have gotten very spoiled by playing the modern games (Gen 5 and on) since they tend to have better level curves and training spots than the older games (even if I think Gen 7 had some notable issues, but it was still better than Johto). Thus, I can often be annoyed by the lack of these things when I go back to replay the main story of an older game. But it doesn’t happen often since I rarely replay the main game/story in Pokémon games, both new and old.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but when I play Pokémon, I generally spend 80-90% of my playtime in the post-game. I usually want to play through the main game and be done with it relatively quickly (but not too quickly, I don’t want to rush through it). I prefer to save most side-activities for the post-game. During the main game, I prefer the side activities that are mostly passive and don’t require a lot of interaction. I think Poké Pelago is the best example of this, it is one of my top favorite features from Gen 7. A part of the frustration with HMs was definitely due to the poor execution, but my (popular) opinion is that the removal of HMs was a good thing, I hope they never return.
While grinding is somewhat easier in HG/SS than in G/S/C, it is still way more tedious than in other games like D/P/P or Gen 5, making it feel like a chore most of the time. Not only when it comes to raising Pokémon for competitive, but also for completing the Pokédex or just training Pokémon in general. It could have been fixed by having a better rematch system and higher levels for trainers in the post-game, and for the wild Pokémon in Kanto and the latter half of Johto.
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A good example that comes to my mind here is Mimikyu in the Alola games. 5% encounter rate, but comes in at level 29-32 (31-34 in USUM) which is right about where the game expects you to be around that point in the campaign, and it’s, well, Mimikyu so it can hold its own pretty well even while you wait for it to get Shadow Claw (Lv37) and Play Rough (Lv46), and there’s still plenty of game left in which to use it. All in all it’s a Pokémon I don’t hugely mind having to scrape for, even if that doesn’t make for interesting gameplay, because it feels worth seeking out.
They went through such a weird arc with this over the course of the remakes lol.
FRLG = No fun allowed, you will play this like Gen 1 and you will like it.
HGSS = Um, well, I guess we can let a few deviations in… we’ll put Misdreavus and Murkrow in the Safari Zone at Lv17… no, we’re not letting you have a Dusk Stone before the National Dex… no, you still can’t have a Houndour… the Ancient Power evos are okay though… no, that doesn’t mean we’re comfortable letting you have Leafeon or Magnezone, let’s not get crazy here…
ORAS = All cross-gen evos permitted! Also, what if we added a ton of additional National Dex Pokémon all the way up to Gen 6 after the Cave of Origin…?
BDSP = What?
Also, “not having access to the region’s native Pokémon” is certainly not a problem you’re going to be running into in BW, of all games…
My guess is it was done to be more faithful to GS than Crystal but it's a weird thing to do that with if so lol. I once traded a Weavile over to my game pre-e4, actually. I also traded over a Houndour around the 4th badge for that playthrough. I traded for several of my early HGSS playthroughs, actually. It frustrated me a bit back then that I felt I needed to rely on that to get Pokémon I wanted sooner but in hindsight it was good for me to take advantage of one of the series' core mechanics and I may do that more in other games in the future.
Fair enough. Just saying the option is there should you want to use it. It wasn't an external means when the event was active in 2010 but you can't time travel to that year. If I could, I'd tell my past self to keep the Pokéwalkers I had safe lol.
Depends on the Pokémon. Ledyba and Sunkern aren't worth being up in the morning to catch but I guess they're meant to be little bonuses rather than something like Larvitar or Misdreavus. Misdreavus is really good in gen 2 even without Mismagius.
It's nice that they at least let you get some of them unlike FRLG lol. I actually used a team a couple years ago with Togetic, Misdreavus, and Pupitar that I made it to the HoF with. They all evolved in the Kanto portion of my playthrough and I actually thought that was kinda neat, that my team continued to grow in what's supposed to be the second half of the game. People treat Kanto more like extra content than an essential part of the playthrough, especially re: their team, and I think that's a critical error. Hell, I waited until Kanto to get Houndour in Silver last year and actually found it neat that I kept a spot open for it until then. It caught up in level pretty quickly, too, so I also don't really understand the complaints about the wild Pokémon levels, though to be fair I also don't really have a defense for it either.
Does it though? Sure the levels increase steadily in the main story but the postgame level spike is a lot. It's way more overwhelming than anything Johto does with levels (besides Red, but that's the point of his fight). Even the e4 swaps to their rematch teams automatically. Having the Lucky Egg helps a little bit but still. It's wild people complain so much about Johto's level curve when other games are far less generous about it. Hoenn has a sudden spike around gym 7 too. Half of Yellow's gym leaders have Pokémon in their *50s*, which to me is way more egregious than anything Johto ever did. Gen 1 also does the level plateau thing that the middle of the Johto games do but that never gets mentioned. People seem to have an unfair double standard against Johto and the only reason I can think of as to why is that it's purposefully designed for you to stop and go off the beaten path, moreso than any other game in the series. It's much more lifesim like and I can see that not being to everyone's taste. Even still, there's plenty you can do to still make it an enjoyable experience without treating it like a lifesim.
People love to use the gym leaders as an example to the contrary but what I think they fail to recognize is that these games were made to be natural extensions of gen 1. They're judging them by standards that didn't exist in the first place or just weren't relevant. X and Y have a relatively small focus on its new Pokémon and sure, they get criticized for it too, but to me it just boils down to personal preference rather than something being objectively good or flawed. More can be said about gym leaders in other games having teams that largely utilize older Pokémon rather than newer ones, the Johto games just do it in the form of Kanto-only teams (which Wattson does too in RS/ORAS). It's really just down to taste than it is about objective game design. Here's avideo that breaks down some of this further and gets into why the team composition is pretty clever actually:
In any case, I feel like if GF, ILCA, or whoever caved and made a Johto remake with fan complaints in mind, it would be plain awful and would betray what the original games and even HGSS were going for, resulting in a much ore by the numbers Pokémon experience. No thank you to that. Rom hacks that do these things already exist and you're welcome to go play those if you're so bothered by these design choices, but I'd rather these misgiving not be validated by those who own the franchise. They made what they made on purpose and should stand by that.
Other people have told me this and I don't know what else to say. You have a problem with time-based trainer rematches and there's a solution available to you, but you don't like the solution. That's your preference but it doesn't have any bearing on what the game allows or disallows.
I find the PokéGear rematches far less tedious than biking back and forth for the grass to shake for Audino (with the occasional curveball) or the VS Seeker. That's just me though. I try to do as many side activities as I can during my playthroughs but will sometimes skip them. I really like Johto's, even if they weren't required to get certain Pokémon/evo items. Voltorb Flip sucks though, and the move tutors using BP instead of shards does too. So I'm not saying Johto is perfect but I do love the Johto games regardless.
Okay, I think the problem is you're missing what the complaint is. For reference, Leader's Aces go 9, 16, 20, 25, 30, 35, 31, 40. The E4 then go 42, 44, 46, 47, 50. And then all of Kanto is 44, 47, 46, 46, 39, 48, 50, 58, with Red at 81. The problem isn't that it's too steep for most of the game, it's that it's too flat. Your team without grinding will end up overleveled and bored from basically the Morty fight onward. The E4 MAY scale quickly enough that you won't outlevel Lance, but as soon as you beat him it's back to Kanto and you being 10 levels over every gym leader, 20+ over every other trainer. And even that's a stretch given how bad Lance's team is. Blue is possibly on-par with you after you finish pubstomping the Kanto leaders, but then it's a 23-level jump to the end boss, and where are you supposed to train for him?
For reference, Gen 1 goes 14, 21, 24, 29, 43, 43, 47, 50, with the E4 at 56, 58, 60, 62, 65. The gym leaders end a full 10 levels lower in Johto despite the region being roughly the same size. The jump from Gym Leader 8 to Elite 1 is 2 levels instead of 6 levels despite having the downhill mountain, the outdoor Kanto routes, and Victory Road instead of just Victory Road to level you up for the E4.
But if you want to change your team to use something available post-Morty, the wild mons are too low-level to add to your team without extensive grinding against other criminally underleveled wild mons, grinding which will likely incidentally overlevel the rest of your mons further. And if you do run into a problem and need to grind to solve it(maybe Lance, certain challenge runs, Red), you simply can't do so reasonably. It's a recipe that makes every possible playstyle end with mindlessly spamming Surf against NPCs who are supposed to be bosses and are at best a distraction.
No, I know what the complaint is. It's flat in gen 1 too for the middle gyms, your numbers only come to demonstrate that point further. Gen 1 just scales higher over fewer gyms. I don't personally find myself bored post-Morty. Janine being lower leveled was weird even if it was fitting for her character. They changed that in HGSS anyway.
I've used Pokémon on my team post Morty just fine, I don't see the issue? I feel like it's easy to look at the raw numbers, team charts, and encounter tables in isolation and feel a certain way but I don't really *feel* these issues when actually playing GSC. Maybe I'm just weird but I think people just have a weird double standard against Johto and I'm not sure where it came from. Significantly less people were complaining about these things 10 years ago. My best guess is this video from a Nuzlocker but I know we're not talking about Nuzlocke runs. Joe Merrick publicly adopted this stance around a decade ago so maybe it's a little from him too? I imagine Reddit had some to do with it too.
Anyway, that's enough arguing from me. Here's why Johto is actually one of my favorites-I like the narrative about the passage of time and how it's conveyed through the plot, the environmental storytelling, and the gameplay mechanics. The batch of new Pokémon is among one of my favorites in the series with guys like Scizor, Heracross, Tyranitar, Umbreon, Politoed, Typhlosion, Houndoom, and Quagsire just to name a few. The comfy vibes are amazing in both GSC and HGSS. Crystal's animated sprites are my favorite in the series. Visiting a new region and then getting to revisit Kanto to see how it's changed in 3 years is so cool. HGSS are probably my favorite video game remakes ever for how well they add on to the experience of the original with very little feeling tacked on. They feel like a natural progression of what GSC did. GSC likewise feel like a natural progression of RGBY. Gen 2 isn't even my favorite in the series but I'd put it around #3 in my overall ranking of the generations and HGSS are my 2nd favorite Pokémon games overall.
Nice. I never tried Misdreavus in Gen 2, guess it could have been a fun option if it wasn’t for the fact that it is only found in the very last area of the games.
I agree, but I think it would have been better if they had allowed you to get all of them before Kanto instead of just some. While I partly agree that Kanto is an important part of the playthrough, I didn’t enjoy it very much. I didn’t find it very motivating to go through Kanto due to the low levels and the lack of story, among other things.
Cool. I never bothered trying to raise new Pokémon for my teams when I got to Kanto. I usually had a full team of six from Johto, and training new team members in Kanto didn’t feel very motivating since they would be at much lower levels than my current team members (which were in their 40s in VC Crystal or their 50s in HG/SS, don’t remember how it was in my childhood playthroughs of G/S/C), and I would have been forced to grind them for a long time before they would be on the same levels as my current team members.
The levels having a drastic increase in B/W is somewhat of an issue, I agree. But unlike in HG/SS, B/W gives you good ways of training your own Pokémon up to those levels without major issues, and the levels actually progress forward at a good pace, which can’t be said for HG/SS.
Hugin already answered most of this, but I want to add a few things. I never found the level spike in Hoenn to be as bad as in Johto. Regarding Kanto, I partly agree with you. The level curve in Kanto has some issues, but I don’t think it was quite as bad as in Johto. Both regions have a sort of flatline, where the levels for the wild Pokémon don’t increase (by much) as you get to new areas, but the difference is that this happens at earlier levels in the Johto games than in the Kanto games. In the Johto games, you fight wild Pokémon at levels 15-25 (or rarely higher) from after Goldenrod up to the point where you go to Kanto before the E4. In comparison, the levels in the Kanto games generally range from 25-40 throughout most of the latter half of the game. Still not perfect, but better than Johto at least.
I think both Johto and Kanto suffer from being nonlinear games without taking full advantage of it. Their nonlinearity accomplishes nothing positive, it just creates issues with their level curves. Nonlinearity in itself isn’t necessarily bad, but it is frustrating when it is done without any benefits.
You’re right, G/S/C were definitely made to be natural extensions of R/B/Y. And that’s okay. I can understand that they wanted to make the Johto Pokémon feel a bit more special by not making them too common, but I think they went way overboard with making too many of them far too uncommon or rare.
I think the big issue here is that HG/SS kept all of this instead of changing it. The Johto Pokémon were no longer new in 2009/10, there was no reason to keep them as rare as they were in G/S/C. People might look back at G/S/C with standards that didn’t exist back when these games were new, but the same can’t be said for HG/SS. These games were released in 2009/10, when there were new standards for things like level curves and training spots thanks to the Gen 3 games and D/P/P. HG/SS should have looked at the standards set by these games instead of keeping the standards from G/S/C. Since they didn’t use the modern standards, it made HG/SS feel like old games with a new coat of paint, keeping the issues from the originals.
I definitely think the Johto Gym Leaders could have used more Johto Pokémon. Their teams don’t have to be Johto-only, but I think every Gym Leader should have used at least one Johto Pokémon on their team. For instance, Falkner could have had a Hoothoot instead of Pidgey (but kept Pidgeotto as his ace), and Morty could kept Gengar as his ace but used a Misdreavus instead of one of the Haunter.
Aside from Wattson, are there any other non-Johto Gym Leaders which only use Pokémon from region other than their own? I can’t really remember any on top of my head. IIRC all other Gym Leaders in all regions use at least one Pokémon from their own region, but I might be wrong.
I don’t have time or interest to watch a 39-minute video, so if there’s anything else you want to address regarding this, I suggest you write it down here on the forums.
If there are a lot of complaints about the games, then it feels like it is something that should be addressed. For instance, let’s look at the Sinnoh games. When D/P were new, they were criticised for several things. Some of the most common criticisms were that they were slow, had a small regional dex and they didn’t feature all the Sinnoh Pokémon during the main game. Platinum adressed these issues by making the games faster, expanding the regional dex and including all non-legendary Sinnoh Pokémon in the main game. On that note, it would make sense for a future Johto game to address things like the level curve and the Pokémon availability since many fans are unhappy with the way these things were in G/S/C and HG/SS.
Is it a solution to the problem? Kind of. Is it a good solution? No. In all other Pokémon games I have played, I have never had to change the time just to be able to train Pokémon properly. In fact, the only times I have ever changed the time on my consoles is when I need to change to and from DST, or for RNG abuse in Gen 4 & 5. To me, being forced to change the time on my DS just to train Pokémon in HG/SS is not good game design. The same goes for the fact that the games basically forced me to make a list of all rematchable trainers, their locations and which times they can be rebattled. I have never had to do that for any other games.
This doesn’t really matter nowadays, though. I’ll never play through the main game of HG/SS again, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever return to them for the post-game either. I feel done with them at this point, I’m not a big fan of them and I have no real reason to go back to them.
Fair enough. I personally prefer the training spots and methods in other games, but to each their own. Regarding the side activities, my issue with Voltorb Flip was not the game itself, but rather the fact that you were forced to play it in order to obtain Coins. As opposed to other games, where you could just buy coins without being forced to play the minigames first. I also agree on the Move Tutors. From what I remember, finding Shards was pretty easy in HG/SS, they had no reason to change it to BP. Not to mention the Move Tutors being quite expensive, and you already need BP for other things like items and TMs. To me, this is just one of many examples of where HG/SS are unnecessarily grindy and expensive for no good reason.
I don’t know about other players, but when I talk about my issues with the Johto games, they are based on my own experiences with playing the games. I'm not sure how much time I put in G/S/C as a kid, but maybe 200 hours? I know my total playtime for HG/SS is somewhere around 3-400 hours. And I spent around 40 hours on my replay of VC Crystal two years ago. So, I have a fair bit of experience with the Johto games.
From what I have seen in the Pokémon fandom, HG/SS are generally praised almost everywhere. People rarely talk about their flaws, though it has become more common in recent years. When people talk about HG/SS, they sometimes mention one or many flaws of the games, but they still praise the games and say they are the best Pokémon games ever. Meanwhile, other games get criticised and nitpicked for every little thing they do wrong. THIS feels like a big double standard to me, HG/SS can seemingly get away with having a lot of major flaws that other games would have been massively criticised for.
Me neither, I just know it's good in competitive.
Fair take. I'm ok with how they handled it but can see arguments against it. GF decided to make the games more linear starting with gen 3 so perhaps they agreed.
If they didn't change it then clearly they see it as a core part of the experience. Or did.
In theory this is true but I just don't think whatever they make would be good. It's probably not happening anyway. We might get a ground-up remake or Legends Johto someday and I would be more ok with that. Let's Go Johto is 100% never happening lol.
Can't relate but you're allowed. I don't think I'm replaying SwSh for a long time, if ever. I'm certainly never playing BDSP ever again unless it's one of the rom hacks.
People seem to like HGSS for what they added more than they do for the Johto experience. Particularly the following Pokémon and litany of postgame content. I think there are double standards for other games in the series, but I'd still say Johto's is unique, even for HGSS. Z-A has certainly been nitpicked to hell and back since it released. I personally find USUM and Let's Go to be unfairly maligned as well.
Do you have any idea how bad this makes your argument look?
Also, game feel is important. I acknowledge that Game Freak wanted to make the Johto mons feel like they were more of a secret than they actually were, but this was a stupid decision.
Johto mons in general aren't strong enough to be worth the trouble, and more importantly, the region itself loses part of its identity.
Many people unironically used to think that Skarmory and Slugma are from Hoenn. When you think about common teams associated with Kanto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh, this usually isn't a problem.
I did not know that actually, might have to go back and change that name then...
The concept of the hack is basically an attempt to fix Johto's flaws. Improve the Level Curve (while still trying to be faithful to the original) and level scaling. Make the Johto Pokémon more readily available while trying to make the weaker Johto Pokémon more viable. Kinda like a mix between enhancement hacks and a third version, thus the name Polished Crystal.
I would say the same about Zorua/Zoroark in BW, the shiny Beldum in ORAS, the Torchic in XY, and the Own Tempo Rockruff in USUM. I don't know how that makes my argument look bad when it's an option available to you. Just because you don't want to do it that way doesn't take it off the table and thus does not mean something is impossible.
I don't really have a problem with it, especially since it applies to so few of them in HGSS. I'm not gonna repeat myself so I'll leave it there. Kalos and Alola do something similar and I don't mind it in those games either, but they get significantly less flack than Johto for it.
I don't have time to analyze every Johto Pokémon's playthrough viability line-by-line but I don't think this is true. In fact, some of the Johto Pokémon people get mad at for being gatekept are some of the best ones introduced in gen 2. That's obviously not all of them but it's not none of them either.
I also never understood the identity part because a region is more than its Pokémon. Gen 2 seems to frame them as newly discovered Pokémon but not necessarily Johto native creatures. GSC slots them in with the original 151 (and later HGSS adds the relevant gen 4 cross gen evos) HGSS too with its regional dex), there's no delineation between Kanto and Johto in the regional dex, so again, you're judging it by standards GF themselves never set for gen 2 in the first place. Johto has a lot of standout locations that I really like such as Lake of Rage, the Burned Tower, the Olivine Lighthouse, and Dragon's Den. I find those locations really neat and can certainly flag them as unique to the Johto region. There's also the more traditional Japanese aesthetic it has compared to Kanto's more modern feel that I believe is a key part of the narrative and the contrast between the two regions.
Hopefully I have explained my position here well enough. I'm honestly tired of arguing about Johto now.
Ok yeah I figured. There are several rom hacks that already do this and I my try them someday but given my position on the popular complaints re: Johto, I'm not sure I'd like them. Nothing personal it's just not to my tastes.
This might have been said before but I just really can’t get behind Pokemon like Tandemaus, Maushold and Falinks where multiple, unconnected creatures make up one singular Pokemon. It just doesn’t make sense to me logically that two mice standing next to each other is a Pokemon. What would happen if one of the Tandemaus got separated from the other? What is left? Just a Maus?
I think this has been discussed before in either this thread or another thread in regard to Mimikyu but I have similar feeling about Pokemon that have elements of their design that couldn’t be realistically replicated across a whole species. Like, are you telling me that every single Sandyghast ever found the exact same spade to put in its head to disguise itself? Every Tinkaton makes the exact same hammer? Every Rillaboom has that drum? Every Machoke has the same belt? I don’t even necessarily dislike any of these Pokemon, I actually really like Sandyghast and Palossand, but logically it just doesn’t make sense!
I think this has been discussed before in either this thread or another thread in regard to Mimikyu but I have similar feeling about Pokemon that have elements of their design that couldn’t be realistically replicated across a whole species. Like, are you telling me that every single Sandyghast ever found the exact same spade to put in its head to disguise itself? Every Tinkaton makes the exact same hammer? Every Rillaboom has that drum? Every Machoke has the same belt? I don’t even necessarily dislike any of these Pokemon, I actually really like Sandyghast and Palossand, but logically it just doesn’t make sense!
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They actually had a Horizons episode about that. If I remember correctly, they just called the single one Tandemaus, and when it's revealed the complete group is actually Maushold, they're like "oh I guess it wasn't Tandemaus all along, it was actually Maushold"
So apparently, a single maus seperated from Tandemaus is still called Tandemaus, and a single maus seperated from a Maushold is still called Maushold, but the two are visually indistinguishable from each other (unless it one of the little Maushold that got seperated I guess, then it's clear that it's a Maushold).
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Exeggcute's been here since day one, a singular Pokémon having multiple discreet bodies has just always been an option.
Rillaboom's drum is part of its body, it just grows it the same as it does anything else. The flat parts literally bend around to connect to its back when attached. It's a body part that comes off, not a separate object it found.
I assume the "space" you're referring to with the Sandygast line is a misspelling of spade aka the shovel. Canonically, no. They just don't want to make another Spinda.
Same goes for Tinkaton, but we actually do see ones with non-standard hammers, both Tinkmaster from Pokopia and Dot's Tinkaton from the anime have non-standard hammers.Scarlet Dex entry said:
Yeah, I do think this part gets overlooked a lot in hindsight, multiple generations in. While Johto does have its own set of starters, legendaries, and pseudo-legendary/powerhouse, it was designed more as a sister region to Kanto as its direct next-door neighbor, and its new Pokémon are designed as a complementary expansion of the original 151 instead of as their own separate new roster. GSC and HGSS are designed as direct sequels to RGBY and FRLG, taking place three years after them in-universe, and they operate on the assumption that you have played Kanto before. It's less effective with HGSS since FRLG and HGSS were farther apart than RGBY and GSC in time of release and on different hardware, but the notion remains.
The "Pokémon formula" people think of with new generations wasn't really established until Gen 3, which was after Johto, and Hoenn was the first region that was really conceived as a "soft reboot" of the franchise, even before Gen 5.
I saw someone a while back say something along the lines of "Gen 1's Pokémon were designed to be enemies for an RPG; Gen 2's Pokémon were designed to be mascots for an RPG". Gen 1 and Gen 2 alike, as well as their remakes FRLG and HGSS to an extent, are much more understandable when you look at them less as "a Pokémon game" and more as a monster-collecting RPG from the 90s: they may be Pokémon and established it, but they were from a time when Pokémon didn't yet clearly have an identity of its own as to "what it was", which didn't really come in until Ruby and Sapphire. A lot of Gen 1 Pokémon are designed as enemy encounters of sorts: Pidgey and Rattata are the standard field enemies, as are Pidgeotto and Raticate, Geodude and Graveler are the rock monsters in caves who are hard to kill with "normal" attacks and in later dungeons they'll blow up and KO one of your Pokémon, Gastly and Haunter were unique ghost enemies in one dungeon who cannot be damaged by conventional means and have annoying tactics like Confuse Ray and Night Shade, etc. And Dragonite was designed as a boss fight that resisted the STABs of all three starters and was hard to take down thanks to its bulk but had an understated Achilles' Heel in Ice moves.
And Gen 2 basically operated with that same set of Pokémon but then added onto it. They still expect players to use, for the most part, a good amount of the original 151 because the added 100 are an expansion of the group instead of a separate roster. Many of them weren't great in battle but had a likable design that comes across as mascot-like. Dunsparce is unremarkable for how extremely rare it is, which becomes a hilarious joke (and one they doubled and tripled down on in Gen 9 many years later with Dudunsparce in their own way), and design-wise it's memorable because it's weirdly boring for how rare it is. Togepi is cute, and heavily tied to Professor Elm in-universe discovering Eggs (and Misty carried it around in the anime way back when). The babies of popular Gen 1 Pokémon like Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Clefairy, Electabuzz, and Magmar all contribute to this vibe as well. Wooper, Hoppip, Mareep, Snubbull, Marill, Teddiursa, Phanpy, and even things like Heracross and Miltank have this "mascot personality" presence that Gen 1 Pokémon don't really have: look at Heracross compared to Scyther and Pinsir or Miltank compared to Tauros. They may not be optimal, but they stick out because they have that kind of design aesthetic.
Both Gen 1 and 2 are quite linked and basically share the design of being more like an RPG and the two being in continuity with one another.
Gen 3 was where they really thought of the idea of "a totally new region with totally new Pokemon and a brand new roster overall" and iterated on since, really.
https://lavacutcontent.com/sugimori-masuda-gen-3-interview/
The difference in Gen 3 and before is highlighted by Masuda and Sugimori themselves, incidentally.
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The latter options I can take in most instances like the Tinkaton Hammer or Rillaboom Drum where it's a relatively mundane and non-specific object (as far as serving its purpose rather vs the Mimikyu disguise explicitly having to look like Pikachu in particular). Realistically the explanation is that they're objects the Pokemon craft or make for themselves as a Species-adopted habit, and the resemblance is not literally-exact for any reason besides modeling convenience by the developers/animators. Like Rillaboom is going to generally have a self-standing Wooden drum, but if we took it literally, observing them would probably have different shades of color or nicks in the wood or rings from the tree trunk etc.
Honestly with some of the odd habits I've heard about in the animal kingdom, and Pokemon clearly treading the line between Animalistic and (Primitive) Human-Sapience/Intelligence already, the idea that an entire "species" would adopt a particular tool or item making habit with a clear symbolic meaning, much less practical use to their behavioral/survival patterns, is incredibly easy to accept.
It gets at the sort of underlying fact that what you see in the games is, in part, an abstraction.
I was thinking about this while reading the Cosmog-only run on this board, but there’s a moment in the Alola games where you battle against a single Team Skull grunt with an abnormally high team count of five Pokémon — but just prior to the battle, you were shown a lineup of five grunts, so the idea is that you’re battling five individual grunts, but they’re just being expressed through this single visual avatar in order to work around the game’s computational limits (I think a Horde encounter in SM would cause the game to crash, lol).
But really, that’s basically the entire purpose of Trainer classes as a whole. Nobody (well, maybe some delightfully silly fringe theorist) thinks that all the Youngsters look identical to one another; they’re just a generic image meant to communicate “a young and inexperienced child.”
It’s the same with the Pokémon themselves. Their design is sort of like a platonic ideal of that species, and you can infer that there are probably minor individual differences, which we see much more frequently in other mediums in which depicting a level of minor variation is more feasible (with Spinda being an exception where they decided to make those innumerable individual differences explicit in the game as well).
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Me too.
And all event mons for that matter. They're not usually available, so of course they don't count.
Fair enough. I won't talk about your post in this case. Agree to disagree and all that.
I would love for some more granular variation on pokemon, but short of a small color palette range that pokemon take from and the already existing size mechanic, adding it seems like itd be a huge hassle. that and to be honest there is a certain appeal to leaving the creature blank so that you can project whatever you want from it as a character
This is one of those things which would be easy to implement in a new series in an interesting way, and very difficult for Pokemon to retrofit in. Because yeah, just list all colors used for the mons, then pull from the personality value or whatever to adjust those colors slightly. You could just be adding -10% to +10% saturation, or you could make it so that each personality value adjusts each color on the list in a specific way, meaning sometimes the contrast in colors is really high, vs the mon is more reddish, vs the two primary colors are really dull but the 2 secondary colors are really vibrant, vs albino. And that would be really cool, opening up all sorts of space for hunting specific colors or just projecting a personality onto the mon, and it's completely impossible to do in modern pokemon with 1000+ species, where the colors of each were set in entirely different tech periods with aesthetics bases on that.
That's kinda similar to what Stadium does, right? Except I think it was based on nickname and not personality value.
Thats just what beastieball does, most beasties have 3-4 colors that vary on a small hue slide. it is really fun, but it does sometimes comes w the issue that some color combos match less than others... they at least had some foresight to make the shiny equivalents have little to no variation Unless the beastie was intentionally made to have five billion combos
Great observation. Another example of this that is a microcosm of this design difference is Venusaur versus Meganium.
The former has an inherent menace that makes it feel like a true monster. The latter is also a good design but far more "mascot-like" and friendly looking.
The Johto games are rife with issues. But one thing I like is this underlying sense that your job as the protagonist is to prove that Johto as the "little brother" region of sorts, deserves a seat at the table with the vaunted Kanto region. And this creature aesthetic difference plays well into that notion.
Many Johto bosses even use Kanto Pokemon when they have Johto options to choose from. So I like to think this is all part of this Johto underdog narrative, even if that almost certainly isn't by design.
Red as a final boss works well to a degree because Kanto Pokemon (including the starters) carry this intimidating presence. And that plays well into this classic RPG goal to "slay the dragon" so to speak. Sometimes almost literally in the case of Lance's Dragonites.