Dexit discussion thread

[R_N]

I do find peculiar however that the partner moves data is present in the games (even including some balance changes).
Maybe they plan to have them return in future titles...

My theory remains they planned to have the Lets Go bonus be the partners but decided against it by the time the moves were balanced.

At the very least can't transfer them to home, since theyre integral to Lets Go

 

[Siggu]

My theory remains they planned to have the Lets Go bonus be the partners but decided against it by the time the moves were balanced.

At the very least can't transfer them to home, since theyre integral to Lets Go

You can always make up a clone.

 

[Scorpio]

Or you could have Move Tutors, which are returning in the DLC...

 

[MaahirMomtaz12]

Or you could have Move Tutors, which are returning in the DLC...

Which apparently includes brand new moves!!

 

[Zé Capáu]

Imagine once the Crown Tundra DLC kicks in.

Source

 

[Skore]

I think once the Crown Tundra rolls around we'll be ready for it anyways.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying the current meta however the only things incoming to shake it up are G Max forms that we know of.

The whole things does make it seem like their balance excuses for Dexit might actually have been true, but surely the same effect could just be achieved with a ban list without having cash grab expansion passes.

 

[R_N]

I think once the Crown Tundra rolls around we'll be ready for it anyways.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying the current meta however the only things incoming to shake it up are G Max forms that we know of.

The whole things does make it seem like their balance excuses for Dexit might actually have been true, but surely the same effect could just be achieved with a ban list without having cash grab expansion passes.

Well I mean the first year of VGC wouldn't have had at least the legends anyway (others, like garchomp, are more up in the air). Those are usually saved for follow up games and years.

e: And to be clear I think no matter what had happened ,we'd probably have gotten them back. I can' see them holding back on legendary pokemon like this for like 3+ years.

 

[Zé Capáu]

It seems that Pokémon Home shows some mons their TM and TR learn set. Data seems temporary and listings might be subject to change.

https://www.serebii.net/swordshield/hometm.shtml



Interesting notes:

- both Raticate variants get Psychic Fangs and Close Combat? ... interesting
- both Nidoqueen and Nidoking get High Horsepower and Body Press, the former is good for both in Doubles while the latter seems a good toy for Queen
- if Wigglytuff, which is also on the list, comes to SwSh then it will possibly become the best Dragapult check in the game
- Poliwrath finally got Liquidation and gets Darkest Lariat, let's clap hands!
- Alakazam gets Stored Power
- Alolan Exeggutor gets Breaking Swipe and Power Whip
- Pinsir and Heracross get High Horsepower, somewhat good for Doubles
- Tauros gets High Horsepower, Megahorn and Close Combat
- Kabutops, Armaldo, Floatzel, Samurott, Carracosta, Alomomola and Bruxish get Liquidation
- Aerodractyl gets Psychic Fangs and... Dragon Dance! Possibly OU if released
- Meganium and Jumpluff get... Pollen Puff? Might work as support for Doubles
- Feraligatr gets Liquidation, Psychic Fangs and Breaking Swipe
- Azumarill gets High Horsepower and Liquidation, yikes!
- Midreavus doesn't get Mystical Fire, but Mismagius does!
- Forretress and Skarmory get Body Press, if Skarmory is in then its rivalry with Corviknight will be fierce
- Granbull, Mightyena and Stoutland get Psychic Fangs, good for screenbreaking at lower tiers
- Dunsparce gets Stored Power.............. well, good... if you get a boost from Ancient Power, that is
- Kingdra gets Breaking Swipe, Liquidation and Hurricane, yikes for the latter if you combine Dynamaxing for Speed boosts plus Swift Swim and 100% Accuracy on Rain after Dynamax is over in Ubers or BattleSpot
- Donphan gets Power Whip, High Horsepower and Body Press
- Miltank and Aggron get High Horsepower and Body Press, with the latter being abusive on Aggron's huge Defense stat
- Raikou gets Aura Sphere and... Scald? What?
- Sceptile gets Breaking Swipe and Dragon Dance
- Swampert gets Liquidation, High Horsepower, Body Press and Darkest Lariat, just wow!
- Breloom gets Close Combat
- Slacking, Regigigas and Archeops are listed here, if they get in then Galarian Weezing might be banned from OU Doubles
- Brace yourselves, Sharpedo is getting Close Combat and Liquidation
- Camerupt gets High Horsepower and Flare Blitz, which means you can now either go physical or mixed with it
- Cradily gets Power Whip
- Walrein and Relicanth get Liquidation and Body Press
- Salamence is going to make a storm with Dynamaxed Hurricanes in Ubers
- Regirock gets Body Press to abuse its 200 base Defense, same for Registeel and its 150 base Defense
- both Latis get Air Slash, Mytical Fire, Breaking Swipe, Dragon Dance, Aura Sphere and Stored Power
- Groudon gets Heat Crash and High Horsepower
- oooooooooohhh.... Fug! :---D
- Luxray gets Psychic Fangs and Play Rough
- Lopunny gets Close Combat, Cosmic Power and Play Rough
- Honchkrow gets Hurricane in case you're all wet to make a full special set out of it
- GARCHOMP DOESN'T GET DRAGON DANCE!!!

- Magnezone gets Body Press

Hide

(reminder: magic is not real, as so as Hidden Power)

- Lickilicky gets Body Press
- Electivire gets Darkest Lariat
- Magmortar gets Mythical Fire
- Gliscor gets Power Whip and Psychic Fangs
- Probopass gets Body Press
- Uxie, Azelf and Mesprit get Stored Power
- Dialga gets Breaking Swipe and Body Press
- Heatran gets Body Press, dunno if it will ever replace Hidden Power, but Heatran will keep being a huge dent in OU for sure, if released
- Regigigas gets High Horsepower and Darkest Lariat
- Giratina gets Breaking Swipe
- Cresselia gets Stored Power
- unironically Arceus doesn't get Dragon Dance
- Krookodile gets High Horsepower, Close Combat and Darkest Lariat
- Amoongus gets Pollen Puff, good for healing allies in Doubles after the Spore-fest
- Mienshao gets Close Combat and Blaze Kick
- Bouffalant gets High Horsepower and Close Combat
- Volcarona gets Mystical Fire
- NO Brave Bird for Landorus, for who ever speculated that until now
- Talonflame gets Hurricane if you're looking for special sets and to dab on Rain setters
- Tyrantrum gets Breaking Swipe, High Horsepower, Close Combat and Dragon Dance, what a blast!
- Carbink (and Diancie) get Body Press
- Klefki gets Stored Power, kinda interested if it works well with Prankster Iron Defense or Calm Mind
- Xerneas gets Close Combat, yikes!
- Volcanion gets Body Press and Liquidation
- all Lycamobile Forms get Play Rough, Psychic Fangs and Close Combat
- Comfey gets Stored Power and Pollen Puff, probably the best Pollen Puff support in Doubles due to Triage priority, Singles-wise Stored Power seems to be a solid Hidden Power Psychic successor
- all Tapus get Stored Power and Play Rough
- Tapu Koko also gets Close Combat
- Tapu Bulu and Buzzwole get Close Combat, High Horsepower and Darkest Lariat
- Magearna gets Stored Power
- Stakataka gets Heavy Slam, Heat Crash, High Horsepower and Body Press
- Blacephalon gets Mystical Fire

 

[R_N]

I counted 323:
-excluded Mythicals (as they will obviously be distributed via events)
-excluded Pokemon that only got Swift and/or Endure
-excluded Pokemon that only got moves that were previously exclusive to events or an evolved stage
-included Zangoose since Seviper got Power Whip

If we take out the Johto and Hoenn starters (stands to reason that they'll slowly add all of the starters via Home like they did with Kanto and Alola) and maybe the UBs (I can see them being added in special Max Raid events separate from the DLC, with the idea being they're "invading" Galar), then that gives us well over 200 but under 300. However, Marketing 101 tells us that they would have advertised this as "over 250" rather than just "over 200."

I took a second pass at it and now I have 326, before excluding mythics, aftrer doing the second & third thing in your list (note: p[ossibly over looked some?), not adding Zangoose
I'm dragging this over to the dexit thread, let's compare notes, here's what I have (segregated by generation, for my dex tracking purposes)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P-Wyf6o1jqmiT_38gFY1t6mamBJ8ftUjm4q6MeJTnxU/edit?usp=sharing

If I do the same exclusions as you in that second paragraph I get about 290 left over
-----------------

So jsut on the blanket assumption that 326 pokemon do indeed come back this year in DLC (shaky ground, I'm aware, let's just pretend Home is doing a lot of work here), we get 164 pokemon remaining. But I was curious how that'd break down by generation

Remaining pokemon per generation
Gen 1: 5 (Pidgey, Pidgeotto, Pidgeot, Paras, Parasect)
Gen 2: 6 (Unown, Teddiursa, Ursaring, Smeargle, Aipom, Stantler)
Gen 3: 16 (Plusle, Minun, Gulpin, Swalot, Spinda, Cacnea, Cacturne, Zangoose, Castform, Kecleon, Tropius, Chimecho, Clamperl, Huntail, Gorebyss, Luvdisc)
Gen 4: 35 (Turtwig, Grotle, Torterra, Chimchar, Monferno, Infernape, Piplup, Prinplup, Empoleon, Starly, Staravia, Staraptor, Bidoof, Bibarel, Kricketot, Kricketune, Cranidos, Rampardos, Shieldon, Bastiodon, Pachirisu, Buizel, Floatzel, Ambipom, Glameow, Purugly, Chingling, Carnivine, Finneon, Lumineon, Phione, Manaphy, Shaymin, Arceus)
Gen 5: 33 (Snivy, Servine, Serperior, Tepig, Pignite, Emboar, Oshawott, Dewott, Samurott, Patrat, Watchog, Lillipup, Herdier, Stoutland, Pansage, Simisage, Pansear, Simisear, Panpour, Simipour, Blitzle, Zebstrika, Sewaddle, Swadloon, Leavanny, Ducklett, Swanna, Deerling, Sawsbuck, Alomomola, Tynamo, Eelektrik, Eelektross)
Gen 6: 23 (Chespin, Quilladin, Chesnaught, Fennekin, Braixen, Delphox, Froakie, Frogadier, Greninja, Scatterbug, Spewpa, Vivillon, Flabebe, Floette, Florges, Skiddo, Gogoat, Furfrou, Skrelp, Dragalge, Clauncher, Clawitzer, Hoopa)
Gen 7: 10 (Pikipek, Trumbeak, Toucannon, Yungoos, Gumshoos, Crabrawler, Crabominable, Oricorio, Minior, Bruxish)

Worth noting that Unown & Smeargle could, within this theory, still be in. Unown would never learn move tutors and it's feasible we get around the Hidden Power thing with an all new original signature move and Smeargle could just...be in the game, since Sketch means it gets every move but not through TM/TR/Tutor.

Which would be quite an...eclectic...set of pokemon (in terms of both the pokemon themselves and the number of them) for a theoretical "final DLC". I'm sure that selection of Gen 4 pokemon is already getting people breaking out the thinking emojis, but it's kind of interesting how similar the selection of pokemon are across 4-7. Gen 5 in particular is very close to Gen 4

 

[Omegagross]

I probably accidentally counted a cross-gen family twice when I got my number (329 with Mythicals included and Zangoose excluded; didn't count Deoxys since Nasty Plot was an event move at one point).

 

[Yung Dramps]

Aight fuck it I'm bored in class and I don't wanna bring this shit to the unpopular opinions thread, and since this thread hasn't really talked about the playerbase ramifications of dexit for a while now I'm gonna do it by getting extremely meta for a sec

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot in the aftermath of the controversy and SWSH's launch has been the legacy of Dexit. How will it be remembered? Will anyone still care 3-5 years down the road? How will being among the last few games pre-Dexit affect perceptions of titles like the Alola games? The 2nd question in particular is one I have contemplated, and after discussing this with a few people on different online hangouts I've come to an interesting conclusion about it. Yes, people will still care in the future, but not in the way some of you might think.

Ya ever seen one of those paragraphs on a Youtube comment section or something about how great Gen 5 was and how it just wasn't treated right at launch? Something to this effect...

"I don't care what anyone says, Gen 5 was awesome! It's such a shame that it was hated on/still hated by ignorant genwunners who can't get over their favorite Pokemon being excluded in exchange for seeing [list of great things Gen 5 did here]."

Now, in order to display how I think Dexit will be remembered, I'm going to edit that hypothetical comment slightly.

"I don't care what anyone says, Gen 8 was awesome! It's such a shame that it was hated on/still hated by ignorant natdexers who can't get over their favorite Pokemon being excluded in exchange for seeing [list of great things Gen 8 did here]."

Yup. I fully believe that not only will National Dex supporters and their cause be largely set aside, but that they'll be looked back on with outright contempt at a level similar to how Gen 5 fans felt about the supposed "genwunner menace" in the years after that generation wrapped up and people began to look back on it more fondly. Hell, I honestly think it could go even higher: When people are bitching about Gen 10 or whatever, I guarantee that they'll be a subset of the community that'll go back to Sword and Shield and think "it showed so much promise for the franchise, but because of the natdexers bitching Game Freak undid everything great to appease them". If you think that's absurd and it couldn't possibly happen after this level of hate and rage, well guess what, that's literally note-for-fucking-note what happened with Gen 5, right down to the core of the complaints being about the handling of old generation Pokemon. Honestly there's all kinds of downright eerie parallels between Generations 5 and 8 from their content to their fan reception, but that's a post for another time and I can't remember all the similarities.

 

[Worldie]

Now, in order to display how I think Dexit will be remembered, I'm going to edit that hypothetical comment slightly.

To be fair.... I think you're basing the thought off a wrong idea though.

Dexit has basically been debunked by gamefreaks themselves. Whenever they purposely lied in order to buy time, planned the DLCs all along, or actually were planning to stick with "dexit" but backlash induced them to opt for the DLC+free update route, in a way or another eventually all the pokemon should be available in gen 8 (or, possibly 9), as it always been.

Thus, noone is going to be able to defend something that doesn't exist to begin with.

 

[Yung Dramps]

To be fair.... I think you're basing the thought off a wrong idea though.

Dexit has basically been debunked by gamefreaks themselves. Whenever they purposely lied in order to buy time, planned the DLCs all along, or actually were planning to stick with "dexit" but backlash induced them to opt for the DLC+free update route, in a way or another eventually all the pokemon should be available in gen 8 (or, possibly 9), as it always been.

Thus, noone is going to be able to defend something that doesn't exist to begin with.

Where did this notion of everyone coming back within the Switch's lifetime come from? Was it the leaked movepool updates? Because right now even those show some mons not getting anything, implying they won't be added in the DLCs, leaving us still short a few hundred or so (and that's assuming everything with new TM/TR moves does come back, which seems unlikely as that includes 300+ Pokemon iirc and GF stated the returning number was "over 200", like I get they're not the best at PR but why would they ever downplay how many Pokemon are gonna come back like that after how fervent the outrage about it was). You could say with the models done for Gen 8 the National Dex should be good to go for a future generation on Switch, but then again that should've meant every Kanto Pokemon should've been in SWSH, and well...

 

[earl]

To be fair.... I think you're basing the thought off a wrong idea though.

Dexit has basically been debunked by gamefreaks themselves. Whenever they purposely lied in order to buy time, planned the DLCs all along, or actually were planning to stick with "dexit" but backlash induced them to opt for the DLC+free update route, in a way or another eventually all the pokemon should be available in gen 8 (or, possibly 9), as it always been.

Thus, noone is going to be able to defend something that doesn't exist to begin with.

I would assume with this new DLC model, though, we’ll have a dexit every gen/game of only a certain pool being available at the beginning of each game.

 

[R_N]

I feel like you kind of have a big chip on your shoulders here, but you're just seeing the usual love/hate cycle in play. Or hate/love, I suppose.

I have seen the same. exact. thing happen with gens 3 & 4 (hell 4 Appreciation Station is still ongoing). 5 is just next line. People grow to like things, they might look back and better appreciate things, you can grow nostalgic for something you didn't think you would and probably more likely is people whose 5 were their first games w hen they were young (solidsnakeold.gif) and who they have strong appreciation for because of that. Also your point towards the gen one thing being what people often bring up is vastly different from my experience. First off, the big game I see touted now is BW2 whose big selling point was all the old pokemon being added to the regional dex. The things I see people hold up and against arguments of old hvae to do with route design, music design, pokemon design (this will always be a mainstay of these discussions), aesthetics, and so on. BW2 (which btw had the big selling poitn of old pokemon returning before post-game so the shade thrown at people throwing shade at gen 1 is a little mismanged imo) in particular probably became vogue because people appreciated how packed the game was relative to, well, SWSH.

At this point I expect Dexit & the state to cause retroactive appreciation more than anything else. Now that BW2 is getting appreciated I fully expect that the long downtrodden Gen 6 stans will rise up sooner than later.

Anyway that said National Dex will likely hang a dark cloud over the generation but would-be gen 8 stans have to go through some extreme gymnastics to blame, I dunno, Gen 10 issues on people complaining about the national dex. I expect there will be shade thrown at them but probably blame The Youths Of TOday or just gamefreak business practices in general. That's already been the big talking point since ORAS, minimum

 

[Worldie]

I would assume with this new DLC model, though, we’ll have a dexit every gen/game of only a certain pool being available at the beginning of each game.

Well, yes, but that's not particularly different from how each new game had a limited pool of mons available until Bank or its update came out.
With the only difference you're also not able to gen them :P

That said, I disagree with that. The main reason provided (of the believable ones I mean) for Dexit was that they didn't have the models/animations ready. I can believe it, GameFreaks isn't exactly topnotch when it comes to modeling, animations or simply being efficent.
However, gen 9, 10 and potentially 11 are going to be on the Switch, so the baseline models and animations are already ready to be used. Of course they might improve models and animations per game, but the amount of work to do would (or... should) be muuuuch smaller than what was required for SwSh.

You could say with the models done for Gen 8 the National Dex should be good to go for a future generation on Switch, but then again that should've meant every Kanto Pokemon should've been in SWSH, and well...

Remember the main issue were the animations, not the models.
Specifically, Pokemon Camp's animations. Which isn't in Let's Go.


TLDR: In the light of the DLCs happening, I do expect next 2 or 3 generations to have entire pokedex available in game right away, at least until the Switch is abandoned and a new console comes out and we'll have a new "Dexit" again.

 

[Ironmage]

An interesting comparison point between gens 5 and 8 when it comes to after-the-fact opinions is that what are usually considered gen 5's best aspects (story, PWT, the existence, if questionable execution, of Challenge Mode) are primarily single-player, where those considered SWSH's are more tuned towards multiplayer (raids, ease of competitive readiness). This is going to make it harder to get a good impression if you pick up SWSH a few years later (after price drops or emulation make the "not worth my money" point less relevant), since most of the playerbase will have moved on unless gen 9 REALLY screws up. Meanwhile, a new-to-them single player experience is going to be just as good as the day it released. After all, would you rather buy Smash 64 or Mario 64 in this day and age?

 

[earl]

An interesting comparison point between gens 5 and 8 when it comes to after-the-fact opinions is that what are usually considered gen 5's best aspects (story, PWT, the existence, if questionable execution, of Challenge Mode) are primarily single-player, where those considered SWSH's are more tuned towards multiplayer (raids, ease of competitive readiness). This is going to make it harder to get a good impression if you pick up SWSH a few years later (after price drops or emulation make the "not worth my money" point less relevant), since most of the playerbase will have moved on unless gen 9 REALLY screws up. Meanwhile, a new-to-them single player experience is going to be just as good as the day it released. After all, would you rather buy Smash 64 or Mario 64 in this day and age?

However, I would assume that SwSh would be judged post DLC release (a few years down the line I’d imagine a SwSh “Gold” or whatever is released with all the DLC prepacked for $60) for future comparisons on singleplayer. As it stands the more valid comparison is BW1 vs SwSh, which feels like a more even field, imo.

 

[Zé Capáu]

Yup. I fully believe that not only will National Dex supporters and their cause be largely set aside, but that they'll be looked back on with outright contempt at a level similar to how Gen 5 fans felt about the supposed "genwunner menace" in the years after that generation wrapped up and people began to look back on it more fondly. Hell, I honestly think it could go even higher: When people are bitching about Gen 10 or whatever, I guarantee that they'll be a subset of the community that'll go back to Sword and Shield and think "it showed so much promise for the franchise, but because of the natdexers bitching Game Freak undid everything great to appease them".

And the worst part of that is that they are appeasing to a bunch of masses who never had intention to buy the games and they are just blindly following the "Gotta Catch 'Em All!" trend. Their irony will smite down once the DLCs are in and the ubermons get released, then the horrors from the Battlespot will be told.

 

[Nix_Hex]

I've been excited about Dexit since it was announced. Getting rid of Hidden Power and giving Mystical Fire to a bunch of Fairy Types was just the icing on the the top of the cake... I hate Hidden Power, but that's neither here nor there. Let's talk Dexit. I'll admit that I never looked at the list of available Pokemon and still haven't. Sometimes I'll realize that certain mons, even ones that I like, are no longer with us yet I still don't feel an ounce of pain about it. I honestly wish that we can get BW1 again with no re-introduction of earlier gen mons in the middle of the generation. We were forced to use brand new Pokemon and I found that really exciting. Maybe I'm weird because I never look back on previous generations as being terrible.

I think a lot of people make a huge detail about Gen 4 being bad or whatever but to me the only bad thing were D/P being so damn slow, and that was just GF being noobs at optimizing the software to take full advantage of the DS's hardware. They learned from that, and Pt and HGSS were great games. But despite the agonizing slowness, I did put at least 900 hours into Diamond and learned the ropes of RNG on it. It was iconic for me in my college years and brings me tons of fond memories. I guess I'm just optimistic about new changes, no matter what those changes might be, because I love that GF has always managed to shake things up in some way or another with new generations. As mentioned earlier, they're bad at PR. That's part of the charm for me.

As for Dexit's legacy, I'm in agreement with what seems to be the popular opinion in this thread, that people will be more forgiving of it once we're a few generations ahead. SwSh are great games in their own right. Having a short story with the ability to power-level your mons with Exp Candies and just plow through the rest of the game was a nice change of pace. I see them as pioneering a new era of Pokemon for the generations to come. If Gen IX has a thousand Pokemon and no repeat of Dexit, I will be just as happy as if they just obliterated all Gen I-VIII Pokemon and started a fresh Pokedex of like 200 Pokemon.

I hope that all made sense, I'm really tired rn.

 

[Ironmage]

I've been excited about Dexit since it was announced. Getting rid of Hidden Power and giving Mystical Fire to a bunch of Fairy Types was just the icing on the the top of the cake... I hate Hidden Power, but that's neither here nor there. Let's talk Dexit. I'll admit that I never looked at the list of available Pokemon and still haven't. Sometimes I'll realize that certain mons, even ones that I like, are no longer with us yet I still don't feel an ounce of pain about it. I honestly wish that we can get BW1 again with no re-introduction of earlier gen mons in the middle of the generation. We were forced to use brand new Pokemon and I found that really exciting. Maybe I'm weird because I never look back on previous generations as being terrible.

I think a lot of people make a huge detail about Gen 4 being bad or whatever but to me the only bad thing were D/P being so damn slow, and that was just GF being noobs at optimizing the software to take full advantage of the DS's hardware. They learned from that, and Pt and HGSS were great games. But despite the agonizing slowness, I did put at least 900 hours into Diamond and learned the ropes of RNG on it. It was iconic for me in my college years and brings me tons of fond memories. I guess I'm just optimistic about new changes, no matter what those changes might be, because I love that GF has always managed to shake things up in some way or another with new generations. As mentioned earlier, they're bad at PR. That's part of the charm for me.

As for Dexit's legacy, I'm in agreement with what seems to be the popular opinion in this thread, that people will be more forgiving of it once we're a few generations ahead. SwSh are great games in their own right. Having a short story with the ability to power-level your mons with Exp Candies and just plow through the rest of the game was a nice change of pace. I see them as pioneering a new era of Pokemon for the generations to come. If Gen IX has a thousand Pokemon and no repeat of Dexit, I will be just as happy as if they just obliterated all Gen I-VIII Pokemon and started a fresh Pokedex of like 200 Pokemon.

I hope that all made sense, I'm really tired rn.

Edit: For context, I've been playing the series since 1998 so one might think I'd be a genwunner, afraid of change. I'm still not tired of Pokemon.

Let me get this straight. The only thing you seem to have wanted to be removed more than BW1's level (which is nowhere near as severe as gen 8's handling) is Hidden Power. Despite this, you apparently view every other cut made to be a good thing, because you enjoy change for the sake of change. Yes, it was experimental, but it's very possible for experiments to be failures. I'm sorry, but I can't read this as anything other than "I enjoyed it, so your criticism is invalid."

 

[Nix_Hex]

Let me get this straight. The only thing you seem to have wanted to be removed more than BW1's level (which is nowhere near as severe as gen 8's handling) is Hidden Power. Despite this, you apparently view every other cut made to be a good thing, because you enjoy change for the sake of change. Yes, it was experimental, but it's very possible for experiments to be failures. I'm sorry, but I can't read this as anything other than "I enjoyed it, so your criticism is invalid."

I didn't say anyone's opinions were invalid, just simply stating my own. Are we not here to do that? Read it however you please, though.

 

[12-XVI]

You never had a TCG set which featured all the pokemon (due to the rotation of sets),

We also never had a Pokemon game which featured every Pokemon (without glitches). Cartridge players were fine with having to use multiple games just like TCG players where fine with having to collect multiple sets.

I don't quite see why the TGC or the Anime would have to "adapt" to the game's Dexit when they've already been rotating Pokemon since ages.

Nintendo has been banning Pokemon from their official tournaments for years, just like they do with cards in the TCG. Dexit is not about banning stuff from official tournaments.

Dexit is about taking that from the players which they collected and putting it in a vault where they hardly can do anything with it. When was the last time that Nintendo tricked the TCG players to put their cards in a vault, and then locked the vault so that the card players essentially lost access to their own cards?

and the anime didn't exactly constantly shove all the 800+ pokemon at same time in the face, with lot of pokemon having shown maybe once or twice in the entire series if even.

What you are talking about is unequal representation, which the games have had since gen 1. Dexit is not about unequal representation, it's about taking from us that which we collected. Since you cannot collect Pokemon in the anime the anime can also not pull a Dexit on us.


So Dexit is unprecedented even in the Anime and TCG.

 

[Yung Dramps]

I've gone back and forth on making this post and resurrecting this thread due to my personal distaste towards the era of fandom discourse it represents and also just the concern that doing so with the encroaching subject matter will seem like the equivalent of me jumping up and down while pompously shouting "I TOLD YOU SO". After thinking it over, I've decided to move forward with it for the sake of getting this take off my chest.

I've been thinking about what I'm about say for a while, but I didn't feel like posting it due to not really wanting to dredge up this thread and give it more life. Seeing as that's already been done for me, I might as well speak my mind, and it isn't exactly a pretty speech.

Because maybe it's the general bitterness and cynicism that's been circulating around the fandom for months now that's finally gotten to me, but I'm seriously thinking that the whole concept of Pokemon transferring was a mistake to begin with. Remember: At one point, Gold and Silver were gonna be the last Pokemon games. Including transfer features was necessary for unobtainable Kanto Pokemon, easier with just 251 Pokemon existing in total at that point, and a cool novelty for what was supposed to be the series' conclusion at a time where it was uncertain if Pokemon had long-term franchise potential or if it was just another fad on its way out. Of course, the "fad" would go on to be a multi-billion dollar juggernaut that would endure for decades, and with this new lease on life came the mutation of transferring from a one-time bonus for RBY veterans to an untamable, ever-growing behemoth.

I would say something about how this was inevitable or that we should've seen it coming as soon as they started putting an additional price tag on the feature with Pokemon Bank, but I can't say that with a straight face, not with the memory of my first response to the news of Dexit on that faithful day of June 11th that I got during a Discord convo, not with that response being something to the effect of "Why would anyone think that? It's obviously a mistranslation." before a news article was shown to me as proof. After that and so much more grief, controversy and anger from the fanbase, I actually do think Game Freak made a stupid decision. The stupid decision to keep up this absurd expectation, the decision to saddle themselves with this unneeded burden. No other game series on the face of the planet has ever attempted something like this, and nobody ever will because to the rational developer, it's far better to work with a self-contained pool of characters and creatures, and trying to bring back all your old creations outside of major occasions like anniversaries is a waste of resources all for negligible returns on their investment.

Gen 3 was Game Freak's last chance to perform the Dexit relatively painlessly. I can see how they could've justified it now: "We feel really bad for the forced loss of Pokemon due to hardware differences between the GBA and GBC, so we're gonna abandon transferring so should a future hardware incompatibility like that happen again, we don't have to put anymore kids or veterans through that pain ever again." But no, they didn't do that, and now here they are 17 years later, finally forcing themselves to peel off that band-aid. Because every new generation with the full dex is another generation of players they could piss off, and the confidence they have shattered after propping up the expectation of that full dex is not worth investing time into cushioning with a detailed direct or video series about how difficult game development is. People are gonna be enraged no matter what you do, so get it over with as fast as possible via a simple statement in a Nintendo Treehouse. Quick and painless is no longer possible, so might as well knock out the "quick" part.

And after all of that and the news that these games are selling gangbusters anyway, I've been thinking. What if transferring was never a thing or was abandoned early on in the franchise's life? Imagine all the time that was wasted trying to make everything old compatible with the new, playtesting, debugging, spriting and later modeling. Imagine that time being put towards other aspects of the games like story and world-building and map design. Could games like XY have been improved with these redirected resources? Could classics like Platinum and Black and White 2 have been even better? This is all speculation which we'll never know the answer to, ideas that may have never came to fruition because of the absolute mess Game Freak chose to entangle themselves in instead.

On December 3, 2019, I made this post. In it, I postulated that the entire concept of transferring was a grave error, my final note being me contemplating the possibility that if it had never been introduced this franchise would've made so much more progress in regards to the main series games.

Slightly over 2 years have passed since. Pokemon Legends Arceus has just released. The way I see it, that game has completely and utterly vindicated every solitary syllable of this post.

Now let me make a few things clear: First off, my statement does not mean to devalue the accomplishments of the people behind this game. Everyone who worked on it from the director to composers to Pokemon designers has more than proven their talents in their respective fields by producing some of their best work on the series to date. At the same time it is also not diminishing the significance of valid critiques or any areas that Game Freak could still stand to improve on. Finally, to an extent this is to be expected: Game Freak steadily improving as a console's lifespan goes on and they get more used to its intricacies is routine.

With all of that taken into consideration, I STILL don't think it's anywhere near sufficient on its own to explain the sheer quantum leap in quality and content in such a short span of time. Remember, that aforementioned 2 year gap in my posts also represents the whole span of time from SWSH to Legends Arceus. Between these two consecutive games we've received improvements to battle flow, Pokemon animations, 3d map design and the initial Wild Area concept whose sheer scope is utterly unprecedented for a franchise more accustomed to incremental improvements. If I could put into a comparison, I'd go so far as to say it would be like if on the DS we went from straight from DP to BW2 in the same timespan in terms of the advancement in using the hardware's greater potential. And frankly even that might be underrating it considering that's in relation to much weaker, less labor-intensive hardware. Don't forget, none of this is even getting into likely more Legends-specific things like the new battle system, the Styles mechanic, new statuses and the major rebalancing of the move roster to accommodate these changes, once again an unprecedented level of mechanical finetuning especially after Dynamax which saw nothing of the sort. It's as if some kind of massive ball and chain was cut off from Game Freak's legs, and considering there are yet to be any apparent overall release schedule changes and at least a decent chunk of this game's development likely being knocked just a tiny bit off-course by a literal fucking global pandemic I can only deduce one potential culprit, the same one I semi-unknowingly deduced 2 years ago.

One more reason I hesitated for a short while on making this post is due to the fact I wasn't sure what to culminate it all in. Double down on my initial bitterness with a whole new retroactive rage about how every pre-PLA Pokemon title has been damaged to some extent? Or perhaps a more hopeful note, closing the book alongside Game Freak on the mistakes of the past and marching towards this exciting new chapter? But in the end, I've decided to end it the same way this whole thread began: Opening up a conversation. Except this time it's not about us trying to come up with a reason why dexit wasn't a mistake. No, what I want to ask this community now is to give me a good reason why the long-standing obsession with absolute backwards compatibility wasn't the true mistake all along, a parasitic presence that only gimped this franchise harder the more Pokemon were made and the more difficult it got to port them over between games. Is there something I'm overlooking here? Is there reason to believe Legends Arceus is but a fluke before we return to business as usual in Gen 9? Abominable PR aside, could anything differently have been done for a smoother transition to this point for all parties?

 

[Ema Skye]

As a Hoenn baby, I grew up with backwards compatibility and didn’t really think much of it. It wasn’t until I learned more about RSE as a teenager when I realized there was a lot of controversy at the time about not being able to link GSC with RS. As an adult now, I’m left realizing that this move, the severing of backwards compatibility, needs to happen again to keep the series going. Pokémon is a paradoxical series: it is both too big to fail but it is growing unsustainably. Dexit seemed to be a solution to solving the unsustainability of the series (models, animations, data and etc for pushing 1000 creatures is a huge undertaking, not to mention everything else in game design).

What Dramps didn’t mention, and I think it’s important, is that Legends only has 242 Pokémon in it, which is less than half of what we had in Gen 4. And yet they managed to breathe new life into these Pokémon in a way nothing else in the series has, with the exception of the anime. For the first time, these creatures are more than a sprite/model animation and a free lines of text; there’s actual personality here! You see how aggressive the Shinx line is, or how huge Steelix is, and I don’t think we would’ve had this level of personality with the Pokémon of that had to put all 900 Pokémon in it.

Given how huge PLA’s launch has been (it outsold Animal Crossing and is now the second best launch for a Switch game - losing only to Mario Kart), the demand is here for more open world Pokémon games. I think this game showed us why Dexit needed to happen and how much good it brings. I don’t think we got justifications for Dexit in SwSh with, amongst other things, the spinning Zacian/Zamazenta (“you cut all these Pokémon so you could improve the animations and this is what we get!”), but I think we got it now.