(Little) Things that annoy you in Pokémon

Pikachu315111

Ranting & Raving!
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Ask yourself, if you were able to go a little off the road and be able to change abilities / nature of your pokemon, would you actually use that bold zubat you caught?
IF I was using a Zubat.

Though here's why I say there's a "concept conflicting":

1. The main draw of replaying a Pokemon multiple times is that you'd want to use different Pokemon. Heck, during the main game Natures, IVs, and EVs rarely matter. Sure, different Abilities may effect how you use a Pokemon, but that leads to a second point:

2. We're not talking about an infinite access of Ability Capsules/Patches. We're talking about one, maybe a second hidden one, give to the player as a "gimme". And that right there brings up a lot of potential for different ways of playing. Do you change the Ability of your Starter? Maybe another Pokemon in your party has what you think would be a better Ability you'd want to change to. Maybe you caught a Pokemon but boxed it because it didn't have the right Ability, but now that you can change it maybe you might reconsider using it.
 
Regarding the discussion about the starter's abilities, I've always seen Torrent/Overgrow/Blaze as abilities to add a clutch factor to some battles. In probably the vast majority of story playthroughs, the starter is the one who can win most battles on its own. There is a little bit of tension when you know the opponent cannot be taken out with another hit. Your starter takes a hit in return and almost gets knocked out. You believe it is over, and select a STAB move because its your highest power, and you may get a crit. But wait, Your starter KO'ed the opponent! yay! Changing your starter's ability during the story would change this, taking away a way to show the power of "friendship" or "partnership" or whatever you decide to call it. Having a generally more useful ability as the Hidden Ability keeps the starters relevant into the competitive scene, without changing the ingame clutch benefit.

1. The main draw of replaying a Pokemon multiple times is that you'd want to use different Pokemon. Heck, during the main game Natures, IVs, and EVs rarely matter. Sure, different Abilities may effect how you use a Pokemon, but that leads to a second point:
I do also think having 1 Ability Capsule accessible during the main story would be nice to have placed somewhere off the beaten path. Having access to change a pokemon that you want to have on your team to a better battle ability (like changing Illuminate to Natural Cure on Staryu/Starmie) should cut down on at least the grinding to find a Pokémon with the ability you want. I know that in my Sun playthrough earlier this year I wanted to find a Triage Comfey to try it out, thought it was a cool thing to try out its signature ability, but I gave up after ~40 minutes or so and only finding 3 Comfey with Flower Veil ( :( 5% encounter rate ). If I could change the ability or knew I could later I would have gone with the first one and moved on.
 
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Pikachu315111

Ranting & Raving!
is a Community Contributoris a Top Smogon Media Contributor

Why is there a Brendan and a Brandon within the same game?
Probably because Brendan/May completely vanish from the story after defeating them in Lilycove and do not appear in the Battle Frontier at all. They wanted a name to reflect Brandon gives out the Brave Symbol and that's what they went with.

Don't forget that same gen we had Wally and Wallace.
 
Probably because Brendan/May completely vanish from the story after defeating them in Lilycove and do not appear in the Battle Frontier at all. They wanted a name to reflect Brandon gives out the Brave Symbol and that's what they went with.

Don't forget that same gen we had Wally and Wallace.
It certainly makes searching for them online a bitch. Was looking for reference on Brendan's hat and headband, and I just get a real stern dude crossing his arms.
 

QuentinQuonce

formerly green_typhlosion
okay so I'm in the middle of an HGSS run and something that has always set my OCD off about the games is that to get to Pewter City and play through the game in chronological order of gyms, you have to go through the most of the east/south sides of the map and slog through a lot of unavoidable trainers along the way just to do the entire thing all over again. I don't think I'd be quite so annoyed if HGSS weren't my only way of playing through Kanto and thus my only way of replicating somewhat how it felt to play FRLG as a child

I get part of this region's charm is being able to do gym's in any order after cerulean and I certainly take advantage of that fact but it sucks knowing how you have to go the extra mile to do it this way
What's really irritating about that is that the game clearly expects you to wait until you get to Brock to start doing the gym challenge, since the guide in Pewter Gym has this to say:

"Yo! Champ in making! You're really rocking. Are you battling the Gym Leaders of Kanto? They're strong and dedicated people, just like Johto's Gym Leaders."

Like, yes, you know full well I'm battling the Gym Leaders of Kanto, you've seen me take down Surge, Erika, Sabrina, Misty, and Janine by this point. It's such a strange dialogue choice for what will likely be the sixth Kanto gym you enter.
 
Another thing that annoys me about HGSS is that there is no change to the dialogue when you face the E4 after getting the Kanto badges. Nothing that indicates recognition that they met and battled you before, just the same script as before. They even copied and pasted the whole Oak/DJ Mary thing after beating Lance again. I'm not sure if this a repeated thing in the series since I almost never go back to battle the E4 and in HGSS it's almost a necessity to train up for Red.

I'm also pressed they didn't replace Karen and Will with Hagatha and Lorelegend for the second go-around of the E4 after getting all the Kanto badges. I remember playing HG for the first time and being shocked when they were nowhere to be found.
 
Another thing that annoys me about HGSS is that there is no change to the dialogue when you face the E4 after getting the Kanto badges. Nothing that indicates recognition that they met and battled you before, just the same script as before. They even copied and pasted the whole Oak/DJ Mary thing after beating Lance again. I'm not sure if this a repeated thing in the series since I almost never go back to battle the E4 and in HGSS it's almost a necessity to train up for Red.

I'm also pressed they didn't replace Karen and Will with Hagatha and Lorelegend for the second go-around of the E4 after getting all the Kanto badges. I remember playing HG for the first time and being shocked when they were nowhere to be found.
E4 rematches are always named as such through dialogue starting in BW1 (and also mostly in FRLG; IIRC Bruno doesn't say anything different, but the rest do).
 
I'm also pressed they didn't replace Karen and Will with Hagatha and Lorelegend for the second go-around of the E4 after getting all the Kanto badges. I remember playing HG for the first time and being shocked when they were nowhere to be found.
Ok I find this confusing. Why would you expect those two to come back? Were you thinking Kanto and Johto were going to have two different E4s with overlapping membership who just shared the same building? Do all of them wait there and sub in/out depending on what region the next challenger’s badges are from? Is Koga allowed to stay for Kanto challengers or is he also an interloper in your eyes?

Tbh I kinda like that there are some unexplained absences. It fits with how other things in Kanto have changed (Power Plant, Cinnabar, Safari Zone) and gives the player room to speculate.

Ask yourself, if you were able to go a little off the road and be able to change abilities / nature of your pokemon, would you actually use that bold zubat you caught?
Not really. If you could edit your Pokemon to be the best it could possibly be during the main game, then everyone would just use the same optimal set.
I kind of agree, but I feel like the flipside of this is that being able to edit Pokémon makes every individual Pokémon more usable, even if it’s because they mostly converge on an agreed-upon ‘ideal’ nature/IVs/whatever.

I think I’d be more inclined to use that Bold Zubat if I knew I could edit its abilities later, since under the current system I’m more inclined to box it, release it, or reset for a better one. In the meantime I might feel more free to experiment with other options, knowing that I could shift to a more optimal set later.
 

Pikachu315111

Ranting & Raving!
is a Community Contributoris a Top Smogon Media Contributor
I'm also pressed they didn't replace Karen and Will with Hagatha and Lorelegend for the second go-around of the E4 after getting all the Kanto badges. I remember playing HG for the first time and being shocked when they were nowhere to be found.
While I would like to know what happened to Loreli (my guess probably went back to the Sevii Islands, a missed opportunity to include though at the same time I can sort of get why they wouldn't include), Agatha's disappearance I less question cause, well, I kind of figured she passed away (or at the very least retired, and considering her character wouldn't be surprised if she decided to di a bit or world exploring before she joined her ghosts).

I kind of agree, but I feel like the flipside of this is that being able to edit Pokémon makes every individual Pokémon more usable, even if it’s because they mostly converge on an agreed-upon ‘ideal’ nature/IVs/whatever.

I think I’d be more inclined to use that Bold Zubat if I knew I could edit its abilities later, since under the current system I’m more inclined to box it, release it, or reset for a better one. In the meantime I might feel more free to experiment with other options, knowing that I could shift to a more optimal set later.
Honestly I wouldn't be against if they had an option to just turn off the effect of Natures during the main game. Like if you catch a Pokemon with the "wrong" Ability you easily just catch a few more until you get the right one. However with their being 20 Natures it's not that feasible to keep catching until you get one with the right Nature. Plus Natures don't really amount to much for the main game, it's the Battle Facilities and competitive where Natures hold more weight.
 
Not sure if it's been expressed in the past, but the new-ish trend that involves naming almost all major NPCs after plants/flowers slightly annoys me, especially when it's not subtle. Like, names like Lillie/Lusamine/Gladion are ok, and Leon/Hop/Rose (is that his first or last name?) are fine, even, but then there's Peony. It's just the name of a flower, straight up, and not even one that could normally just pass as a given name. What's next, Carnation? Chrysanthemum? Cactus?
 
Not sure if it's been expressed in the past, but the new-ish trend that involves naming almost all major NPCs after plants/flowers slightly annoys me, especially when it's not subtle. Like, names like Lillie/Lusamine/Gladion are ok, and Leon/Hop/Rose (is that his first or last name?) are fine, even, but then there's Peony. It's just the name of a flower, straight up, and not even one that could normally just pass as a given name. What's next, Carnation? Chrysanthemum? Cactus?
Someone in the translation team must like gardening.
 
I'm immune to Peony being weird because fire emblem heroes also has a character named Peony (fairies, they're all named after flowers) so it just reads as a name at this point

So far as flower-names go honestly it's not even that much weirder than Dahlia, Rose, and so forth. It's a fairly short easy to say name with a distinct sound to it, but it onlt sticks out because no one's really used it as a name.




also funny you mention carnation because Diantha's japanese name is "carnet", a corruption of carnation. (Diantha from Dianthus flower genus)
 
Not sure if it's been expressed in the past, but the new-ish trend that involves naming almost all major NPCs after plants/flowers slightly annoys me, especially when it's not subtle. Like, names like Lillie/Lusamine/Gladion are ok, and Leon/Hop/Rose (is that his first or last name?) are fine, even, but then there's Peony. It's just the name of a flower, straight up, and not even one that could normally just pass as a given name. What's next, Carnation? Chrysanthemum? Cactus?
The Japanese names of important humans have almost always been plant-based; they've only started to do it more in English around Gen 5. Oak was originally Orchid but is still a plant reference, Karen was close enough to Karin, Alder is a reference to the plant species in the Japanese name, Clemont works in the citrus-fruit original Japanese name (similarly with melons and Melony), Guzmania is a flower genus (iirc), and Oleana references olives (they couldn't use Olivia because that was used for a kahuna last gen).

It's all over the place.
 
The Japanese names of important humans have almost always been plant-based; they've only started to do it more in English around Gen 5. Oak was originally Orchid but is still a plant reference, Karen was close enough to Karin, Alder is a reference to the plant species in the Japanese name, Clemont works in the citrus-fruit original Japanese name (similarly with melons and Melony), Guzmania is a flower genus (iirc), and Oleana references olives (they couldn't use Olivia because that was used for a kahuna last gen).

It's all over the place.
I was curious about all the other localized names and it seems like just about everyone in gens 7 & 8 uses plant names (either the same as Japan or new ones that more directly reference a pun & I assume fits whatever aesthetic) except....Nessa? Who's just a classic water pun.
 
I was curious about all the other localized names and it seems like just about everyone in gens 7 & 8 uses plant names (either the same as Japan or new ones that more directly reference a pun & I assume fits whatever aesthetic) except....Nessa? Who's just a classic water pun.
Yeah, they still use traditional type-based puns here and there, but they've largely switched to matching the plant names of the Japanese games. Unfortunately English lacks the subtlety/repetition of Japanese, because there's usually some sort of type reference in the Japanese name, too.
 
Yeah, they still use traditional type-based puns here and there, but they've largely switched to matching the plant names of the Japanese games. Unfortunately English lacks the subtlety/repetition of Japanese, because there's usually some sort of type reference in the Japanese name, too.
Mmmmmm I mean, yeah, some are like hedged in kanji puns (Brock's Takeshi is like 4 puns deep) but also we get things like Alister's japanese name being onion. Lysander's is Fleur de lys. Vaguely referencing their apeparence or personalty that'd be plainly obvious to anyone. And other times you just get people named after plants just....because, i guess. Melony is Melon (...obviously); Malva is Pachira.
on the flip side we do have our own "subtle" names, Kiawe is specifically from a plant used for charcoal

I´m personally much more annoyed by the horrible type puns some of the gym leaders have as names. Most of them are subtle and actually kind of clever, like Candice, Whitney or Roxanne, but then there are Gym leaders like Bugsy, Brawly, Roark or Gardenia... Who calls their kid Gardenia? Borderline child abuse if you ask me.
Gardenia & Skyla are both up there for "you couldn't think of anything else?" for me
 

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