(Little) Things that annoy you in Pokémon

Pikachu315111

Ranting & Raving!
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Why on earth is Mega Punch so bad. I always forget how bad this thing is, and just assume "oh it's probabyl the slightly weaker but more accurate alternative to mega kick" but no

well i mean yes but no

mega kick is 120 BP and 75% accuracy, mega kick is 80 BP and...85% accuracy. That's terrible even just limiting the comparison between the pair but then you remember that wait even in a return-less world, these 2 moves exist
Strength: 80BP, 100% Accuracy
Body Slam: 85BP, 100% accuracy, and then also a 30% chance fo paralyze

In gen 1 it at least had a brief shelf life since you got the TM so much earlier than Strength & Body Slam (ss anne, i believe) but after that you really just left the move like this? Removing Strength from the greater pool of moves aint it, gamefreak. Very bad. Go back to the drawing board on this one.
I say just make them both 100 Power and 95% Accuracy, no secondary effect ("But that overshadows Strength" make it 90 Power and ignores the targets Defense increases).
 
One little thing that annoyed me recently, Serious Mints.

Right now I've got like 18 of them in my inventory, I find them in the Crown Tundra seemingly more often than any of the others. Any one of them could have been jolly or bold or something else useful. I don't think that anyone has actually used one.

They're just something that Game Freak could have just not bothered to put in the game. Although I guess we should be grateful that there aren't five different types of mints with neutral natures...
 

ScraftyIsTheBest

On to new Horizons!
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The Serious Mint's best use is for in game purposes if you're fortunate to run into one in the IoA and for whatever reason you got a mon you want to use that has a nature that hurts its best stats but you have no other mints since most are post game, so the Serious Mint imposes a "neutral nature" on it to let it use its otherwise hindered best stats effectively, and neutral natures are okay for in game purposes.
 

QuentinQuonce

formerly green_typhlosion
Yeah this sounds about right. Neutral natures aren't necessarily the worst thing, even if they aren't the best option either it's easy to see that they would want to offer the option.
someone out there probably does use neutral on purpose
FWIW a lot of mixed sweepers used by opponents in the Battle Frontier/Subway/whatever tend to be neutral, I suppose to avoid having to compromise defences or speed. I'm sure at least some people IRL think along similar lines.
 
Yeah this sounds about right. Neutral natures aren't necessarily the worst thing, even if they aren't the best option either it's easy to see that they would want to offer the option.
someone out there probably does use neutral on purpose
I dont get why there are so many neutral natures, would have been more normal to have just 1 neutral nature and 5 HP natures imo
 
I dont get why there are so many neutral natures, would have been more normal to have just 1 neutral nature and 5 HP natures imo
This is actually a programming thing. The data doesn't have a slot for "is this neutral?", only "increased stat" and "decreased stat." Neutral natures just increase and decrease the same stat, so there are five of them to correspond to the five nature-modified stats.

Single types actually work the same way: rather than having a dedicated Null type (no relation to Type:Null), single-typed mons just have both of their types the same. I'm still annoyed they changed how aggronite works in Mix and Mega from "secondary becomes Steel" to " secondary becomes same as primary."
 
Freeze: Only 20% chance of thawing, which is way too small, and it’s even worse back in Gen 1 and 2, which was only a mere 10%. By far the worst of the bunch. While thawed by Fire-type moves, it is too small to be a counterbalance.
I always felt like it was a missed opportunity to make freeze the opposite of burn, weakening special (and then later on spatk) and hurting each round, or literally anything else tbh.

Our current freeze is the very well known status of jrpgs, but considering how we already have sleep, and how even gamefreak themselves realized freeze is too broken to be used like you'd use status conditions and just stuck it on 10% chances of a few ice moves, it's basically a dead status, mechanic wise. It'll appear once or twice in a competitive setting since you just accumulate too many battles to not see the 10% effect activate, but all it does is cause an RNG nightmare for your foe, and it's not super fun or clutch to play around or with it
 
Watching False Swipe Gaming's new video of How GOOD was Charizard actually? when I realize just how screwed Charizard was on offense in Gen 1.
1626882577364.png

For comparison, Venusaur has 100 Special while Blastoise has 100 Defense, meaning Charizard gets the worst stats on both offensive and defense in exchange for having 100 Speed to either use Fire Blast and die instantly or set up Swords Dance and die instantly.
1626883083208.png

Mercifully, Gen 2 gave Charizard 109 Special Attack so it isn't the statistically least offensive fully evolved Kanto Fire Type anymore.
 
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This is actually a programming thing. The data doesn't have a slot for "is this neutral?", only "increased stat" and "decreased stat." Neutral natures just increase and decrease the same stat, so there are five of them to correspond to the five nature-modified stats.

Single types actually work the same way: rather than having a dedicated Null type (no relation to Type:Null), single-typed mons just have both of their types the same. I'm still annoyed they changed how aggronite works in Mix and Mega from "secondary becomes Steel" to " secondary becomes same as primary."
Interesting didnt know that
 

ScraftyIsTheBest

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To be fair, Charizard can get by on Swords Dance with its decent physical movepool in Gen 1, albeit not with Slash because of the crit mechanics in that gen.

But yeah, Gen 1 was just horrendously unkind to Charizard in all the worst ways. It has the weakest offensive and defensive prowess of the three starters, meanwhile Venusaur gets good bulk and good power while Blastoise has high physical bulk. For in-game purposes Charizard is hurt not only by its stats but also its poor level up movepool, as it doesn't learn Flamethrower until around Level 46, which is close to the end of the game, which means you're stuck with the weak Ember for a long, long time. The Fire Blast TM is also fairly late in the game too. Meanwhile Venusaur gets Razor Leaf reasonably early and given the way crits work combined with Venusaur's speed, that's a powerful move that always crits coming from Venusaur. And Blastoise can of course consistently get good STAB: it gets Bubble Beam relatively early on thanks to Misty, and it can upgrade to Surf around the mid-game which is great. That's not even to mention Charmander's inherent disadvantage against the first two gyms in RBY combined with how Fire is a pretty poor type for Kanto.

Competitively it also sucked because Fire was by far one of the worst types to use in Gen 1 competitive. Rock was considered one of the best defensive types in Gen 1 and Rhydon was a competitive juggernaut in RBY competitive, and well... you know what that entails for Charizard. Plus stuff like Starmie and Slowbro as Water-types to destroy it. Not to mention RBY UU had a lot of Water-types like Tentacruel too. Combined with only average offenses for that time period and its lack of bulk compared to others, and it was just a sad mon all around.

For such a fan favorite, Game Freak has historically been quite mean to Charizard.
 
Watching False Swipe Gaming's new video of How GOOD was Charizard actually? when I realize just how screwed Charizard was on offense.
View attachment 360233
For comparison, Venusaur has 100 Special while Blastoise has 100 Defense, meaning Charizard gets the worst stats on both offensive and defense in exchange for have 100 Speed to either use Fire Blast or set up Swords Dance and die instantly.
View attachment 360234
Mercifully, Gen 2 gave Charizard 109 Special Attack so it isn't the statistically least offensive fully evolved Kanto Fire Type anymore.
At least it had Fire Spin.
 
Replaying Moon rn, Pom-Pom Oricorio.
Are you talking to face or to use?

Because I used one and hated it. It's a cool poke with a fun gimmick, except that the gimmick is completely useless for 75% of the game. Electric/Flying is one of the best defensive type combos in the game, so you should catch it at lvl 10 in the Pom-Pom style and never swap unless you need it's secondary STAB for a major fight. But it doesn't GET a secondary STAB until lvl 40. So it's literally just a generic Flying type with an odd ability and decent stats for the entirety of the first 3 islands, in a game with a long list of more interesting flying-types available. It's /fine/, but they literally made a gimmick poke where the gimmick doesn't come up except for maybe 2 battles. Why.
 
It's not really a secret that the Battle Tower was eviscerated in Sword and Shield for some bizarre attempt at parity with Battle Spot, but all that doom and gloom tends to overshadow GameFreak's serious attempt to make good Battle Facilities again in both DLC expansions, that was in my eyes largely successful. Unfortunately, both lack a hugely important feature: Suspend!

Restricted Sparring is in the Isle of Armor, and forces you to use a monotype team with only 2 party heals for your streak. The second restriction is hugely limiting, and possibly why GameFreak didn't think it was necessary to add a suspend feature. But regardless of what they thought, good RS streaks can often take multiple days even with heavy play, to say nothing of how much extra time top level and/or lighter play sessions can add to the time elapsed during a streak. You can, of course, use the Switch's sleep function to take breaks, but this has multiple issues. First, you can't play anything else on your Switch during a streak. Personally, I like to play multiple games on my Switch, but this isn't possible during a streak. It essentially forces someone to fully commit to RS for a while, even though there are many times I'd like to just play for an hour or so, then play something else more relaxing. The second issue is hard/software failures. While these are unavoidable to some extent, never having the option to close down the software only exacerbates the issue. I love RS, but this can unfortunately be a sizable damper on it.

But that's nothing compared to the other facility introducted in the Crown Tundra, Dynamax Adventures. For a lot of people, this was a fun way to get all the legendaries, but it also has an endless mode that is functionally a new twist on the Battle Factory. You can play this mode single player, though having 3 dumbass AI partners tends to put a stop towards both motivation and the length of your streak. For this, the lack of suspend isn't a huge deal, really. But if you want to play with friends? Hoo boy. First, multiplayer in Pokemon forces animations on, which adds a lot of time. From some runs others have done, a solid 4 player run can take several hours. Getting 4 people together for several hours can be a bit of a logistical hassle by itself, but DA does everything in its power to make the experience worse. First, you only recruit people at the start of your streak. So if one person has to leave earlier than the rest, well, congrats, you have an AI partner for the rest of the run and there's nothing you can do about it. And then, every option in DA is timed. Picking the route or the defeated Pokemon is 20 seconds, and picking a move is 30 seconds (online only, at least). These are pretty short timers! Thankfully, timing out just picks a default option (route choice goes to where your cursor is, the defeated mon choice is no and it picks the first move in your set) instead of disconnecting, but still, when I say you need to have 4 people together for several hours, they need to be THERE. God forbid even a 5 minute distraction comes up for someone. And since it's online, there's no way to utilize sleep mode. It all comes together for a package that's almost as hostile to the player as possible. Honestly, I've barely played Endless DA, and that's a huge shame since I think this facility is really, really cool.

It's a shame that two really good aspects of the DLC have to deal with this baffling lack of suspend. It gets even more aggravating when you realize it's been a mainstay of previous Battle Facilities, and from a handheld gaming series no less, when handhelds are the epitome of "people have other things to do". I recognize that both modes have some slight complications wrt implementing a suspend feature due to their lack of healing, but I simply can't see it as a big enough barrier to justify not implementing a feature whose omission is very much to the detriment of both facilities.
 
During my current playthrough of Y (and also my recent one of USUM) one thing that's kind of annoying is how many missed opportunities for doubles battles there are. This isn't even a matter of "oh there should be more doubles battles," but more so the "you walk into a room with 2 trainers in it, and then the the game has you fight them one by one." Especially in Y because the enemy admins each only have like 2 pokemon, so its not like it would be unreasonable to have them be a doubles battle vs 4 pokemon.
 
The lag in gen7 games is real, but for whatever reason gen6 seems to run doubles battles mostly fine. Kinda sucks just because so many pokemon get interesting doubles moves via level-up but you have like 7 opportunities to use them the entire game (none of which are gym battles), so they're kinda useless and not worth it.

Edit: I'm gonna take the low hanging fruit and add that the extent to which doubles battles lag also kinda annoys me, but not as much as the earlier point.
 
The lag in gen7 games is real, but for whatever reason gen6 seems to run doubles battles mostly fine. Kinda sucks just because so many pokemon get interesting doubles moves via level-up but you have like 7 opportunities to use them the entire game (none of which are gym battles), so they're kinda useless and not worth it.

Edit: I'm gonna take the low hanging fruit and add that the extent to which doubles battles lag also kinda annoys me, but not as much as the earlier point.
I think that's because there are 2 trainer models on screen too which makes it slower. That would explain the lack of Triple and Rotation battle.
 

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