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Game Freak hit with another hack, info leaking
- Thread starter Yung Dramps
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Slowly going through the BW learnsets. So far this is the most curious detail I've seen, Alomomola and Klink line having Crush Grip, Regigigas signature move
I can see why, since Crush Grip is nearly the same as Wring Out, only being Special rather than Physical. While Crush Grip is a signature move, Wring Out is not, so stat wise it doesn't really come across as a signature move.
So I guess whoever drafted these learnsets wasn't aware that it was a signature move
I can see why, since Crush Grip is nearly the same as Wring Out, only being Special rather than Physical. While Crush Grip is a signature move, Wring Out is not, so stat wise it doesn't really come across as a signature move.
So I guess whoever drafted these learnsets wasn't aware that it was a signature move
Not to mention Crush Grip is a terrible Signature Move for Regigigas. You gave a Pokemon who starts the first five turns of battle with half Attack a Signature Move which is at its strongest when the target is at full HP and only becomes weaker as the target loses HP.
I don’t want a frontier just battle video. Being able to battle against actual EV and IV trained Pokemon 6v6 was so good, especially being able to customize them. I don’t know if many people even knew battle video could be used to simulate battles but I was more upset when that was taken away in SwSh than dexit. I would still buy two switches just to have the capacity to do that.
It should be noted that legendary signature moves turning to generic moves very rarely happens. The only time it happened is with sacred sword which was exclusive to the musketeers but gained by the Honedge line and to an extent sacred fire (gained by Entei) and heart swap (gen vii Magearna).
Regarding Battle Frontier, I personally see the place as the late-game or post-credits challenge mode often present in other JRPGs. A bonus boss of sorts, that tests all your knowledge of the game, which is usually good, right? I was too shy as a kid to go to forums or showdown to request battles, so battle facilities are something I've always appreciated.
If you are looking from the perspective of dragging like 10 or more ribbon masters through Battle Tower, then yeah, it absolutely sucks, but earning round 2 trophies once in your life is something that feels like a real achievement.
If you are looking from the perspective of dragging like 10 or more ribbon masters through Battle Tower, then yeah, it absolutely sucks, but earning round 2 trophies once in your life is something that feels like a real achievement.
Which I see as a possible reason why they decided to pass on the idea, even if Crush Grip is probably one of the "safest" ones to make the leap.
And even in the latter two cases, they were mons with very specific thematic overlap (Magearna is the Soul inside a Metal Body shell so the Heart Swap is a body change, while Entei is specifically the Fire "Trio Underling" of the Sacred Fire user).
I feel it's because Legendary Signature moves are baked a bit into their lore or given very specialized animation/flavor, while a lot of regular Signatures aren't particularly "special" beyond the Signature move being the first time they're done (Volt Tackle is bigger Wild Charge, Toxic Thread is just Poison and a Spider), so I often feel like they're a way to test the waters for an idea or mechanic before distributing it more widely. If it's fine, they can invigorate old stuff; if it's bad, then it's just a pointless gimmick for one mon experiment. Either way the player base gave them more robust testing than their team could ever manage even in a reasonable dev time.
It really isn't if you think of it.
Since SwSh they are opting for a postgame that involves logging in the game regularly every so often (a-la live service).
Battle Facilities don't offer this. They're already extremely niche as is, with the playerbase for them being insanely small, and outside a dozen or so people on the internet, even the people who played them played them for a bit then dropped them.
Compared to raids... you don't have to go further than this forum to notice a massive difference in involvement (even when gen 7 and 8 were current) between the weekend 7* raids, and the facilities.
Development time on facilities is just wasted effort. (as much as it saddens me as I am in that small niche of players who likes them)
I just don't see why the sudden change in approach when again, LA of all things have it.
Not all battle facilities actually require a lot of asset creations, as already disucussed in this thread, not all of them are like Hoenn's Battle Frontier. With Blueberry already existing as a background and a building, you would only literally only need to have the player speak to the woman in front , then face X consecutive battles. That's it. You got a budget Battle Tower-like. It's weird to argue they wouldn't want to waste development time on it when they did anyways for the coach battles (or whatever is the English name for the battles and trades with characters you invite), a feature that most fans are going to ignore anyways as it needs precious BB points which are used in way too many other things, including the big deal that wild starters are.
I also don't see why raids would be overlapping with them. Sure, they keep the game more alive, but again, they are already "wasting dev time" in this logic with other offline content that is designed for the player to keep coming into the game for a while after completing it (otherwise, starters would be unlocked right away or after catching Terapagos, and Snackworth's legendaries would not need points either. They clearly want you to farm for them). Raids are pretty much unrelated and could perfectly coexist, specially since whatever barebones team is still handling them wouldn't be the same working on the base game or DLC, which has probably moved long ago into gen 10.
SWSH's raids definitely didn't take off at all even if they kept doing them. Meanwhile it had also a mediocre battle tower. Then still added a second facility and arguably a third depending how nice you want to be about Dynamax Adventures; both of which had incentives to keep playing them far more than the raids.
(& if we got a step further I'm willing to be that Battle Tree had such a level of more commitment to it compared to anything else considering how badly we kept bombing the Festival Plaza events)
So to see all that, and conclude: obviously raids are the future is a level of basket packing I think isn't the case.
I mean, heck, we didn't even get a chain raid mode which would probably have been a significantly easier thing to set up even if they didn't want to spend time making raids specific to the mode.
meanwhile historically it is weird: since the introduction of the battle tower the only games without an equivalent have been FRLG (it kind of tried to position Trainer Tower as a replacement) and Let's Go (perhaps they saw Master Trainers as a replacement?). Even L:A had a rough equivalent with the Eternal Reverie (and a rough equivalent of master trainers with Path of Solitude). And that's a game with a battle system it barely wanted you to actually use!
i do think the effort involved probably did make it easier to axe, lord knows SV clearly wanted some more time, but I don't think it was axed purposely so they can shift 100% to Raids as "post game".
I'd disagree, i'm 100% sure that "raids as postgame" is their plan and they don't consider facilities worth the hassle.
Guess we'll see about that part in gen 10 once it releases. Personally I'm confident we'll just see a repeat, more cyclical generational-gimmick-related content, 0 facilities, and just a token "grind this thing for BP" thing.
Guess we'll see about that part in gen 10 once it releases. Personally I'm confident we'll just see a repeat, more cyclical generational-gimmick-related content, 0 facilities, and just a token "grind this thing for BP" thing.
PLA isn't really a counter example since PLA is a singleplayer only game. You can't even do online battles in it, let alone have a reward structure for doing it.
It's also probably the lowest effort Battle Facility type thing, it uses an arena that was basically just decoration in the base game and it's just event coding, which is probably a bit time consuming but also doesn't really have unique assets.
Being able to rebattle/battle important trainers has been more of a trend in recent generations than Battle Facilities, ironically.
Let's break this down:
(Note, this is adding to my distaste of Serebii because apparently it doesn't have a resource for the Champion Defense battles lol)
Sun and Moon has Champion Title Defense which IMO started the trend, though B2W2 is arguably the real creator of the concept of course. In it you can rebattle most important trainers along with other trainers that are miscellaneous, but often with unique designs or important in some way:
-Faba
-Gladion
-Hapu
-Hau
-Kukui
-Molayne
-Plumeria
-Ryuki
-Sophocles
-Tristan (aka the youngster joey guy lol)
USUM takes away Molayne and Faba to add in Lusamine and Guzma. This along with the Battle Tree IMO marks a recent trend in the franchise where they seem to really value giving you a way to rebattle important trainers, and not just Gym Leader rematches.
Sword and Shield continues the trend when, in DLC2, you're given the Galarian Star Tournament where you will play in double battles in pairs with plenty of story relevant trainers, if not all of them:
And then in Scarlet/Violet we get the Academy Ace Tournament, clearly a successor to this concept. You can fight
-Arven
-Jacq
-Dendra
-Geeta
-Hassel
-Miriam
-Raifort
-Saguaro
-Salvatore
-Tyme
-Penny
-Nemona
-Clavell
Which is basically every base game character trainer that matters IIRC. And then you get the Indigo Disk rematch capability with the DLC, where you can rematch basically everyone.
Legends Arceus' training grounds also lets you rematch a bunch of trainers, though not everyone.
So IMO it's clear that one of their focuses with post-game content nowadays is letting you rematch the characters rather than playing against NPCs, probably partially because they tend to be putting more emphasis on the characters in general.
I don't know if I'm misreading this part, but Blueberry Points are basically entirely designed to be grinded online in co-op.
Like I actually quit doing the Blueberry Dex because I started a year after people stopped caring about the DLC, because I calculated it'd be something like 30 hours to grind the points needed solo, and that'd be tedious. The game also continuously encourages you to do it online with friends, and people talk about how it is a really fun co-op experience.
BP is like very explicitly designed for multiplayer tbh.
I spent like 300 hours in SWSH even though I thought the games were mid, a lot because of the Dmax Raids. It's addicting to get on and see what rare high stats Pokemon I could get, and to have friends ping me that they found a shiny we could all grab.
Dynamax Adventures in the DLC also took up a considerable amount of my gametime with it being really fun to grind with friends tbh.
The incentive for dens is simple: Good Pokemon. All of them are guaranteed to have pretty good stats, they were the only way to get HAs on launch, and they also gave plenty of other rewards.
Den grinding was very common before the DLCs. I'd say the DLCs took away a lot of the reward by adding Ability Patches, making HAs much easier to obtain.
On top of just giving good Pokemon, it was also basically a built-in dupe, with all of your friends getting too mooch off of your find and catch their own. I remember hopping on several times in December 2019 when friends told me they got good Ditto raids, for example.
This is the kind of thing of why I don't care for "Getting competitive Pokemon should take 5 seconds and have no work in it" because a lot of the endgame stuff is about getting good Pokemon in recent gens, almost like an MMO that doesn't blow up the Switch.
I still think it'd be nice to have battle facilities, I just don't agree that SV and SWSH don't have thought out endgames.
You already mentioned it but yeah BW2 was really the turning point where this shift began. Its two battle facilities were the PWT (self-explanatory) and Black Tower/White Treehollow, which didn't abide by the typical rules like level locks and such, having more in common with standard main story content than, say, any given Frontier facility.
XY/ORAS were the last time we saw a trace of the old ways, really: They didn't have major trainer rematches of note as well as introducing the Battle Chatelaines, the last set of new characters tied to a battle facility.
That said SV not having a Tower is definitely a dev time problem, I mean yeah LA's EBR has no new assets but it's something
I did think of that too, but I didn't add it to my post.
Looking more at the early learnsets, there are a few more instances of legendary signature moves being distributed.
For example, Genesect, Kyurem, Reshiram, Victini and Zekrom all learn Sacred Fire. However, it is clearly a placeholder for their respective signature moves.
Which lead me to believe "Oh maybe they are all placeholders for gen V moves then". But it doesn't seem to be as clear-cut as that.
For Alomomola, it just loses Crush Grip after a slight learnset revamp, and the Klink line at one point had Gear Grind and Gear Shift at the same time as Crush Grip.
With Lilligant, I also thought that Lunar Dance was a stand-in for Quiver Dance, but it was Teeter Dance that got replaced, before getting added back in again.
However, the most widely distributed legendary signature move is Psycho Boost. Elgyem line, Solosis line, Meloetta, Munna line, Swoobat and Victini all learned it one point.
With Psycho Boost, it is unclear if it is used as a placeholder or not. For some, like the Elgyem line and Victini, it seems to be a placeholder for Synchronoise and Stored Power respectively. On the flip-side, those moves might simply be the replacements after Psycho Boost gets removed from their learnsets.
Meanwhile for Reuniclus, Psycho Boost survives a few moveset revisions before being replaced by Heal Block.
It should be noted that most of them lose Psycho Boost in the same revision.
My likely incorrect guess: I don't know if there are dedicated "placeholder" moves in code, so having moves that are supposed to just not be on any other Pokemon is an easy way for other developers to remember "this needs to be replaced at some point with a proper move."
Though at that point, I don't know if it's really easier than just making a placeholder dummy move (idk if that exists, again, probably does) or why they'd go through the effort of seemingly using correct typed moves.
On that note, I'm a little surprised the Legendary Birds were never given Aeroblast via event. It would have made lore sense(Lugia is tied to them in various movies), been something people would actively want, and would solve the problem of Zapdos not getting a special flying move because it's barred from Hurricane.
An alternate Sinnoh map with the mythical locations was found and I'm crying at Seabreak Path
Zapdos does learn Hurricane as of SWSH, via TM/TR!
Though something tells me going out of their way to not give it the "good" (?) flying special move for 3 generations would probably mean it would not have gotten Aeroblast -the arguably significantly better move- either.
I stumbled across a Sun & Moon move design document while looking for another SM document.
From a quick glance, it seems that Strength Sap and Pollen Puff used to be Fairy-type
Pollen Puff being Fairy-type could have had some serious ripple effects down the line, imagine Shadow Rider Calyrex with 90 power Fairy coverage move.
A few moves have deisgn notes that list Gundam, Macross and NGE as references as well, which I thought was cute
From a quick glance, it seems that Strength Sap and Pollen Puff used to be Fairy-type
Code:
668
ちからをすいとる Strength Sap
妖精 Fairy
Code:
676
かふんだんご Pollen Puff
妖精 FairyPollen Puff being Fairy-type could have had some serious ripple effects down the line, imagine Shadow Rider Calyrex with 90 power Fairy coverage move.
A few moves have deisgn notes that list Gundam, Macross and NGE as references as well, which I thought was cute
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