I mean I even mentioned that was an option I just don't think it's that great an idea for the situation and would exist specifically and only to facilitate a team up with your rivals that is purposely not set up because you just fundamentally do not have that relationship with those characters so we can have a 4 character raid.
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(Little) Things that annoy you in Pokémon
- Thread starter BriarRose
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I mean I even mentioned that was an option I just don't think it's that great an idea for the situation and would exist specifically and only to facilitate a team up with your rivals that is purposely not set up because you just fundamentally do not have that relationship with those characters so we can have a 4 character raid.
iirc Kris was planned to be in HGSS at one point (there's a phone icon or something for her in the data I think?) but they went with Lyra for whatever reason. Maybe they thought Kris was too blue and thus Crystal coded?
I similarly mentioned contingent on Marnie having a reason to exist, because as the game currently exists I'd probably cut her and Bede is hanging by a thread, so the hypothetical version of the game where this is the finale also assumes there's a reason to have a circle of 4 like SV instead of 2-3 like most preceding stories.
I just Googled it. I hope it's not a hoax, but apparently, this is the unused PokéGear sprite that's in the games' data (on the left) :
That's crazy. If it's real, then that's unfortunate.
It's a shame we don't have any story notes for SWSH from the leaks, because I'm curious if Marnie might've had more of a role at some point that just got paired back for one reason or another (pacing, changes in plan, not enough time, etc etc)
I can absolutely see the logic of having an extra couple of rivals for this go around: it's a sporting event with a ton of distinct challengers and only some of them can make it to the end. So you want to have more familiar faces and have stuff like the mid-point drama with Bede. & Marnie has all this scaffolding with Piers, Team Yell just being die hard fans, her (probable) crush on you, etc but it's like we only got the cliff notes.
Like everyone in SWSH has their own little issues, even the arcs I like, but Marnie really sticks out.
I guess one thing that's gotten to me recently is how Game Freak always used to make Spiritomb a real headache to obtain (e.g. having 32 conversations in the Underground and hunting for 107 wisps scattered around the whole game) as if it were some adorable Mythical, or even a majestic Legendary. No, it's a rock with purple gas oozing out of it that has a BST of 500. Not worth all of that.
It's an amalgamation of 108 evil spirits sealed away. Gameplay-wise, it also had (under normal circumstances) no weaknesses in its debut generation.
I'm not knowledgeable enough about the 108 symbolism (IIRC it's a Buddhism thing?) to say for sure but I assume that Spiritomb being a royal pain to acquire could also be a commentary on how it's easier/better to be a good person than a bad one (it takes more muscles to frown than to smile).
I get your gripes with it, but Spiritomb's heavy numerical focus (especially in Gen 4) and its consistent position as a frustrating-to-obtain Pokémon help make it charming to me. Maybe I'd have more issues with it if it couldn't breed or if trading wasn't a major part of Pokémon.
I'm not knowledgeable enough about the 108 symbolism (IIRC it's a Buddhism thing?) to say for sure but I assume that Spiritomb being a royal pain to acquire could also be a commentary on how it's easier/better to be a good person than a bad one (it takes more muscles to frown than to smile).
I get your gripes with it, but Spiritomb's heavy numerical focus (especially in Gen 4) and its consistent position as a frustrating-to-obtain Pokémon help make it charming to me. Maybe I'd have more issues with it if it couldn't breed or if trading wasn't a major part of Pokémon.
Really, SwSh just had too many plot threads. There's Chairman Rose, Bede, Marnie, Team Yell, Hop, Leon, and Eternatus, all with distinct char arcs and plots that the player interacts with. Often events will be feeding multiple of those storylines at once when the player does something to advance the story, which makes tracking any one arc or getting a consistent emotional read difficult.
Enough ink has been spilled over the endgame of SwSh, but I just want to point it out: You fight Marnie, then Hop, in the qualifiers. Then Bede shows up and you have to fight him even though he didn't get all the badges. Then you rematch 3 gym leaders. Then Rose puts the tournament on hold and you have to fight through a dungeon to beat his peons. Then you need to retrieve the artifacts from Slumbering Weald. Then beat Rose. Then beat Eternatus in a battle. Then team up with Hop/Zac/Zam for a raid. Then beat Champion Leon. It's a mess, and the only way to make it not a mess is to radically reorder everything, which presumably wasn't an option for various reasons.
Enough ink has been spilled over the endgame of SwSh, but I just want to point it out: You fight Marnie, then Hop, in the qualifiers. Then Bede shows up and you have to fight him even though he didn't get all the badges. Then you rematch 3 gym leaders. Then Rose puts the tournament on hold and you have to fight through a dungeon to beat his peons. Then you need to retrieve the artifacts from Slumbering Weald. Then beat Rose. Then beat Eternatus in a battle. Then team up with Hop/Zac/Zam for a raid. Then beat Champion Leon. It's a mess, and the only way to make it not a mess is to radically reorder everything, which presumably wasn't an option for various reasons.
You have to wait until the Switch Z comes out for that to happen
Hm, after reading that made me realize my problems with SV's storylines may not have started there.
GF seems to be weary to have multiple storylines mix even though they naturally would at certain points. Like, I'd have to check back, but I don't think they ever have more then one storyline event occur in each route/major location in SwSh. Meaning the Legend/Sonia, League/Bede, and Team Yell/Marnie storylines (geez, they're even organized the same way as SV's storylines) are all fighting for that one story spot which in turn makes everything feel, for lack of a better work, assembly line. AND, in the few times the stories do mix, it kind of causes the end of one of the storylines: When the Legend/Sonia and Bede storylines intersect it causes Bede to be disqualified and it's not till the Pokemon League until he appears again for one battle (not counting post game). And when the League storyline crosses with Marnie/Team Yell, it ends with Team Yell no longer being an antagonistic force. Heck, the storylines don't even fully come together in the end, while Team Yell helps during the early part of the Pokemon League, when the Darkest Day happens they're nowhere to be seen. And Marnie and Bede never interact even though I'm sure Team Yell at some point would have to at some point pestered Bede (though Bede is a strong enough trainer to get past them).
Wouldn't the Switch Z just be a jailbroken Switch 2?
lmao fr. It felt like at every city or notable location, you'd meet hop, then you'd meet bede, then you'd meet leon (while an npc tells you he's the undefeated champion with a charizard for the 1000th time), then you'd meet rose, then you'd meet team yell and/or marnie, then you'd meet the professor lady. People complain about USUM having too many cutscenes, but they genuinely didn't bother me there, whereas sword and shield felt like such a drag brcause of this and it's part of the reason I stopped playing halfway through
Gigalith's pokedex entrees across generations repeatedly mention that it absorbs sunlight in order to fire energy beams, and the sum total effect of this lore is that it's a physical attacker that learns solar beam. Gigalith's SpA stat is so low that a solar beam from it will barely tickle a tirtouga.* It didn't even get solar blade after the move was introduced! They could have at least made Gigalith's hidden ability Solar Power, or even chlorophyll to add on to the absolute joke of having the sun bolster Gigalith's weakest stats. Instead, when they added a weather-related ability in Gen 7, it was sandstorm. Sure, Sandstorm is practically more useful to it than sun, but I just gotta feel bad for the guy that he just loves firin' off energy beams in the sun but his trainers keep making him throw rocks in sandstorms.
*I'll save you all the trouble of calcing it: this is a joke, a 252+ solar beam from Gigalith does OHKO a 252/252 neutral SpD nature Tirtouga with solid rock, but you gotta pray to Arceus to OHKO if it has a SpD boosting nature.
I don't see what's wrong with this? I thought SwSh's endgame was cool. It's good to tie together plot threads and I didn't find any of it particularly confusing. Only the gym leader rematches seem out of place until you realize you're fighting this game's Elite Four.
Yeah, to me it seems like a pretty straightforward structure. In Galar, the Pokémon League is a massive, seasonal event with competitors coming from all over the region to hopefully participate in the finals. That just inherently creates an organic point in the narrative at which the various characters’ arcs are bound to converge. I don’t think SwSh has some exceptional story writing or anything, but it makes sense — you want multiple rivals to help sell the idea that you have actual competition in this huge, public sports event, and those rivals will inevitably make it to at least the semifinals in some way or another because otherwise their arcs would just peter out too early, so for the main body of the story you divide the time among them.
So Hop goes through his crisis of confidence relatively early on, which lets Bede sort of take over until he gets disqualified and then taken under Opal’s wing, and then with both of them off the field for now, Marnie gets (if you ask me, not enough) focus at the point where Pokémon stories have traditionally preferred to reveal what the evil team’s deal is. But they’re saving Eternatus and all that for the actual climax (taking a cue from Gen 5’s structure with N’s Castle overriding the Champion fight), so this is instead where we get the less-serious secondary villain team’s main section.
The skeleton is fine, I think it’s just not got enough muscle in the actual writing. Like why isn’t Marnie more involved in the Spikemuth segment? She just tells us where the back door is, disappears, and then shows up at the end to challenge Piers offscreen.
How else would she be involved? It's a gym, it's not like she'd be allowed to team up with the player.
I wouldn't be against Gigalith getting a Signature Move: Crystal Refract (Physical Rock-type expy of Hydro Steam. "The user redirects light within its crystal structures to release a tactile beam, its power increases in harsh sunlight").
Also maybe toss on Morning Sun and Growth so it has more to do in Sunlight than just attacking.
Why not? She could team up with us for Double Battles against the Yell Grunts/Gym Trainers (thus they could make those battles a little bit more difficult). As we go through Marnie could point out things about Spikemuth and how it's like growing up there, how tough it is being a City without a Power Spot thus ignored by the Pokemon League since it and the conglomerate Macro Cosmos are both run by Rose whose business relies on mining and manipulating Dynamax energy.
Either do what Pikachu315111 said and have her team up with you as you go through the Gym — Gym gimmicks can be whatever the developers need them to be, so there’s nothing saying a Gym can’t be designed to revolve around a series of Multi Battles (maybe Piers, being a musician, wants to emphasize collaboration, or maybe since it’s a punk town that no one pays attention to, the rules are a little more relaxed) — or extend the part of the story that deals with Spikemuth being closed down and having to find a way in so that the Gym itself is an isolated affair, but Marnie has more room to actually participate in the plot leading up to it.
The ending of SwSh is perfectly logical. It's the climax of the story, everyone's arc should end around there. But it's bad, because you have a half-dozen character arcs and plot threads all wrapping up in the same space, interrupting each other and not giving any individual one time to breathe. I can understand why it happened, but we arrive at the League, go through a 6-man boss rush of recurring characters and emotional beats, then put all that on hold to immediately handle 1-3(depending on how you count) dungeons comprising 4 boss fights(mix of main villain and box legend), then come back for the champion. They needed to move some of that around, including to other parts of the game, to give us space to process each part, and making various elements naturally flow into each other better would help.
This is something I think SV did a lot better, because they just isolated each story(and story-related character) to give them all time to breathe. It's artificial, but it makes things a lot cleaner.
This is something I think SV did a lot better, because they just isolated each story(and story-related character) to give them all time to breathe. It's artificial, but it makes things a lot cleaner.
For me this is where SwSh feels the weakest. The endgame isn't the plot threads "tying together" so much as just being brought up and formally stopped (not ended, stopped). The haphazard pacing and mixing of the plots has already been mentioned, and to me the fact that the post game is basically necessary to close off Marnie's story with her taking over Spikemuth while Bede's is just a footnote repeat of the battle during the League finals makes me think they didn't really know what to do with them as narratives so much as "the characters need to show up here" even when it adds nothing to them and takes away from their other stuff.
There was prior talk, myself among it, about how SwSh structures its finale around a Raid Battle while SV (base game) doesn't, despite the latter being the one where your companions are given an emphasized presence. Giving Marnie and Bede a part in the Darkest Day finale was an option there to more organically weave the plots together, and given they helped you search for Leon it's not like it'd be an abrupt shift for them to be aware of the Macro Cosmos stuff. Maybe you and Hop go to assist Leon while Marnie and Bede go to get the Rusted Sword and Shield (in a parallel to Bede's Wishing Star collection and defacing a monument which happened to reveal Zacian and Zamazenta's role) and catch up as you find him battling (since you plowed through all the security and Rose).
On the matter of flow, I also think they should have pulled a BW and either ended the main game without a Leon battle, or formally placed it before Eternatus. There are any number of directions to take from there: Rose interrupts the Award Ceremony instead of the start to Grand Finals; Rose springs it literally the moment you win (Leon's "after the Championship" as exact words); Rose interrupts the battle as in the game and both sides are too exhausted/the venues too damaged to conduct the battle for a while. Leon's team being exhausted from the battle would even provide a reasonable framing for why he could be the Super Boss while still losing to Eternatus.
I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this, but I'm looking at the move lists for Pokemon in Gen I and II atm and there are so many species which get Dream Eater and/or Nightmare yet have no way of putting an opponent to sleep.
The developers knew that rest would be a popular move in gen 2
Next Switch will be called Switch-Z. You heard it here first.
