TODAY ya boy will truly jump the shark and compare pokemon to super smash bros ultimate
so i think that pokemon has gotten too successful for its own good, as my man codraroll has put it in several eloquent posts. however, i mean the term in a different way.
there are over 800 pokemon now. that's a lot. all of them are carefully designed visually, thematically, and (less carefully) competitively. i think this is by far the biggest resource pokemon has as a game at this point-- there are so many well designed mons that people are gonna have a lot of favorites. even outside fan favorite mons like the starters and eeveelutions, each person is going to have a pretty sizable pool of mons they like the designs of. you have the specialized, calm alakazam. you have the excellent bananasaur tropius. you have the twisted, super powerful dragalge. you have the SICK LEGENDARIES like necrozma and thundurus t.
the problem is, the pokemon company doesn't know what to do with this asset. they just keep sending us on the same linear adventure, over and over again, and i think that there's so much potential that they haven't used here.
"gotta catch 'em all" just doesn't work as a motto anymore, because "catching them all" is boring and unfulfilling when you have 800 mons to catch. people don't want to catch 'em all. people want to use 'em all. people want to see what each pokemon has to offer (with varying degrees of competitive knowledge), not just catch them, give them some experience, and be done with it. people want gym/e4/champion battles to be full of mons that actually do different things, instead of gf just getting lazy, giving them a bunch of high base power moves, and calling it a day.
let's look at super smash bros ultimate. i don't have the game so can't speak from experience. but from what i know, there's a story mode and stuff where you get to unlock all the characters, there's ai that's actually decent at the game, and there's competitive play that's decently accessible for new players.
now when you look at pokemon again, it has these things. there's a story mode where you catch mons, there's competitive play. but for the most part, there's no ai that's actually decent at the game.
however, there is one place where you can find decent ai. that place is the battle tree. (yeah i know the tree ai is dumb, but it at least offers competition.)
now i, and other people, have ranted about there not being multiple facilities anymore for a long time now. but for what it is, the battle tree is honestly pretty well done. singles and doubles are both cool, and you can change the music that plays during games too. the sets are pretty diverse. you can use the mons you like to their full potential here. this is the best place to play the "actual game" short of playing other people.
the problem, of course, is the fact that 90% of the time (maybe less if you have long streaks in tree), you're not playing the actual game. you're just catching stuff or breeding or ev training or level grinding your mons. the level 100 bottle cap limit is garbage. the game gives you the freedom to use almost any of the 800+ mons available to you, but at the same time, there's this absurd time barrier that you have to get through before you even get to use them. it's like if you had to go through a backstory for each character to unlock special and smash attacks in smash ultimate, except instead of carefully crafted content you just hold down b and spin around the circle pad and mindlessly knock out wild mons on poni island.
it's bad.
because of all this, you're literally discouraged from using anything you don't already have. i want to have an alakazam, and a tropius, and a dragalge, and a thundurus t that can all hold their own in competitive mons, but it would literally take hours to get just one of them. there's some dude who plays battle tree that has a whole army of trick room pokemon and randomly selects mons from the army to use. that sounds super cool to me, but i just don't have the huge amount of time or motivation to do all of that. but in smash, you can use whatever character you want, whenever you want, with the only barrier being your own skill with them. and even then, i'd rather grind out tech skill for hours in melee than breed, because with the tech skill i'm actually improving at the game, while breeding is just the game lifting this completely arbitrary barrier and not increasing my skill level or understanding whatsoever.
the worst part is that if gamefreak made ivs/egg moves/natures/evs more easily adjustable, they could literally have you playing the actual game right from the beginning of your adventure. "increase your pokemon's latent values with this special drink!" "you have 157 evs total, use the slider bars to adjust how much is invested in which stat." "your pokemon looks to have mostly physical moves, but it has a timid nature. would you like to change that?" but instead, they insist on locking it behind hours of work that goes against the point of playing a game at all. and this is the reason why the vast majority of people who've played pokemon don't have the slightest idea how it works competitively, because this incompetent game company flat out refuses to teach them. just imagine how much bigger this community would be if the games made the slightest effort to be actually accessible instead of "cool i only have to spend 3 hours now instead of 4...wait nvm they removed blissey bases and hordes, back to 4 then"
thats why pokemon sucks.
thanks for reading
so i think that pokemon has gotten too successful for its own good, as my man codraroll has put it in several eloquent posts. however, i mean the term in a different way.
there are over 800 pokemon now. that's a lot. all of them are carefully designed visually, thematically, and (less carefully) competitively. i think this is by far the biggest resource pokemon has as a game at this point-- there are so many well designed mons that people are gonna have a lot of favorites. even outside fan favorite mons like the starters and eeveelutions, each person is going to have a pretty sizable pool of mons they like the designs of. you have the specialized, calm alakazam. you have the excellent bananasaur tropius. you have the twisted, super powerful dragalge. you have the SICK LEGENDARIES like necrozma and thundurus t.
the problem is, the pokemon company doesn't know what to do with this asset. they just keep sending us on the same linear adventure, over and over again, and i think that there's so much potential that they haven't used here.
"gotta catch 'em all" just doesn't work as a motto anymore, because "catching them all" is boring and unfulfilling when you have 800 mons to catch. people don't want to catch 'em all. people want to use 'em all. people want to see what each pokemon has to offer (with varying degrees of competitive knowledge), not just catch them, give them some experience, and be done with it. people want gym/e4/champion battles to be full of mons that actually do different things, instead of gf just getting lazy, giving them a bunch of high base power moves, and calling it a day.
let's look at super smash bros ultimate. i don't have the game so can't speak from experience. but from what i know, there's a story mode and stuff where you get to unlock all the characters, there's ai that's actually decent at the game, and there's competitive play that's decently accessible for new players.
now when you look at pokemon again, it has these things. there's a story mode where you catch mons, there's competitive play. but for the most part, there's no ai that's actually decent at the game.
however, there is one place where you can find decent ai. that place is the battle tree. (yeah i know the tree ai is dumb, but it at least offers competition.)
now i, and other people, have ranted about there not being multiple facilities anymore for a long time now. but for what it is, the battle tree is honestly pretty well done. singles and doubles are both cool, and you can change the music that plays during games too. the sets are pretty diverse. you can use the mons you like to their full potential here. this is the best place to play the "actual game" short of playing other people.
the problem, of course, is the fact that 90% of the time (maybe less if you have long streaks in tree), you're not playing the actual game. you're just catching stuff or breeding or ev training or level grinding your mons. the level 100 bottle cap limit is garbage. the game gives you the freedom to use almost any of the 800+ mons available to you, but at the same time, there's this absurd time barrier that you have to get through before you even get to use them. it's like if you had to go through a backstory for each character to unlock special and smash attacks in smash ultimate, except instead of carefully crafted content you just hold down b and spin around the circle pad and mindlessly knock out wild mons on poni island.
it's bad.
because of all this, you're literally discouraged from using anything you don't already have. i want to have an alakazam, and a tropius, and a dragalge, and a thundurus t that can all hold their own in competitive mons, but it would literally take hours to get just one of them. there's some dude who plays battle tree that has a whole army of trick room pokemon and randomly selects mons from the army to use. that sounds super cool to me, but i just don't have the huge amount of time or motivation to do all of that. but in smash, you can use whatever character you want, whenever you want, with the only barrier being your own skill with them. and even then, i'd rather grind out tech skill for hours in melee than breed, because with the tech skill i'm actually improving at the game, while breeding is just the game lifting this completely arbitrary barrier and not increasing my skill level or understanding whatsoever.
the worst part is that if gamefreak made ivs/egg moves/natures/evs more easily adjustable, they could literally have you playing the actual game right from the beginning of your adventure. "increase your pokemon's latent values with this special drink!" "you have 157 evs total, use the slider bars to adjust how much is invested in which stat." "your pokemon looks to have mostly physical moves, but it has a timid nature. would you like to change that?" but instead, they insist on locking it behind hours of work that goes against the point of playing a game at all. and this is the reason why the vast majority of people who've played pokemon don't have the slightest idea how it works competitively, because this incompetent game company flat out refuses to teach them. just imagine how much bigger this community would be if the games made the slightest effort to be actually accessible instead of "cool i only have to spend 3 hours now instead of 4...wait nvm they removed blissey bases and hordes, back to 4 then"
thats why pokemon sucks.
thanks for reading
