The Rotom items that Ginter sells. Did they just fall out of the hole in the sky and he lugged the washing machine, electric fan, fridge, oven, and lawn mower back to Jublife Village? Also, what happens to wild Pokemon when they faint? Do they just fall over and disappear forever?
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the implication is a lot of ginter's wares are from rift and he's just selling weird boxes based on assumption.
I think the whole "Pokemon can shrink and grow" explanation is applied here in that the Pokemon shrink to stop battling. Personally, I just assume the shrinking animation is just standard video game affair and the Pokemon runs away after being beaten unchanged.
If we go by anime logic, fainting in the anime is usually depicted as the Pokemon falling over with spirals in their eyes, effectively appearing unconscious. The games just usually depict their sprite disappearing by dropping down the screen or the model falling over and then shrinking into disappearance, but that's mostly game limitations to portray fainting. In reality they probably just fall over unconscious and it's clear to the Trainer that they are unable to continue battling. Eventually they recuperate and then just continue their lives as normal until another Trainer arrives to either capture them or defeat them.
Ok so when people complain about the animations for flying mons like skarm and tropius it's often brought up how it was done this way for XY's Sky Battles but like... is there any actual proof of this? It's an explanation that never really sat well with me simply because Sky Battles are just such an underutilized thing in XY that it's hard for me to believe that the animation department was made to bend over backwards for them. In fact Tropius and Xatu, two of the animations people complain about the most aren't even IN the Kalos dex!
No but considering how specific Sky Battle regulations are, it would be mighty coincidental that of all the birds to make permanently airborne it just so happened to land on pokemon like Xatu, who are just never shown flying in most capacities, unless the intent was the flesh out the ability to have more sky battle-capable Pokemon (which yes DOES have trickle down dumb decisions but we don't have time to get into all that)
Wouldn't surprise me if Sky battles were at one point in development meant to be more present and maybe even have a dedicated mode, honestly.
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Sky_Battle#Eligible_Pok.C3.A9mon
If you look on Bulbapedia's ineligible Pokemon for Sky Battles, all the levitating/Flying Types cannot be used, even if they can truthfully fly in canon, like Shaymin-Sky and Hawlucha. This is proof that the models ( whether they are airborne or not ) determine whether can participate in Sky Battles.
The Confusing, Contradictory Conundrum of Overworld Pokemon in Sword & Shield
If you've ever been in discussions about SWSH's development, you may have come across this interview with Ohmori and Masuda on the official Pokemon website. Among other tidbits here and there, the most fascinating part comes at the very end:
"One thing we didn't originally intend to implement in Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield was having Pokémon roaming around in the field. After Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let's Go, Eevee! were released and we saw how popular the feature was, we worked hard to bring it over to Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield for a lot of the Pokémon and adjusted the balance of the games to make it work."
This passage and its claims have been met with mixed reactions by those who've read it. Some admire Game Freak being so receptive to fans liking a new feature. Others label this a damning indictment against the state of development and the audacity to try to crowbar in a major feature this late. Regardless of how you feel, the simple fact of the matter is this: This statement does not make any sense with what we know of SWSH's development cycle.
You remember that series of beta leaks? The latest of which is dated May 25, 2018? Well here's a screenshot of the barely completed Wild Area from one of those betas, and huuuuh would you look at that overworld Pokemon are definitely implemented and being tested, albeit in an obviously deeply incomplete form. Again, while I don't know which of the 3 builds this screenshot is from, at the absolute latest this is from May 25, 2018. I'm pretty sure you can immediately see how flagrantly this flies in the face of the interview claim that overworld Pokemon weren't even a consideration until LGPE released and the feature was praised by audiences. Note that wording by the way: They explicitly say when LGPE released. That right there eliminates the possibility of some kind of internal focus testing for Let's Go in early 2018 or late 2017 yielding positive results from playtesters which inspired the SWSH team.
After thinking over any way to reconcile this massive contradiction I am only capable of concluding that Masuda & Ohmori either exaggerated or flat-out lied about this particular development detail in a misguided attempt to make Game Freak look better. No, this explanation doesn't sit right with me either, it seems just as weird and out of character as you think, but I only default to it because all the alternatives seem even more outlandish:
If you've ever been in discussions about SWSH's development, you may have come across this interview with Ohmori and Masuda on the official Pokemon website. Among other tidbits here and there, the most fascinating part comes at the very end:
"One thing we didn't originally intend to implement in Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield was having Pokémon roaming around in the field. After Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let's Go, Eevee! were released and we saw how popular the feature was, we worked hard to bring it over to Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield for a lot of the Pokémon and adjusted the balance of the games to make it work."
This passage and its claims have been met with mixed reactions by those who've read it. Some admire Game Freak being so receptive to fans liking a new feature. Others label this a damning indictment against the state of development and the audacity to try to crowbar in a major feature this late. Regardless of how you feel, the simple fact of the matter is this: This statement does not make any sense with what we know of SWSH's development cycle.
You remember that series of beta leaks? The latest of which is dated May 25, 2018? Well here's a screenshot of the barely completed Wild Area from one of those betas, and huuuuh would you look at that overworld Pokemon are definitely implemented and being tested, albeit in an obviously deeply incomplete form. Again, while I don't know which of the 3 builds this screenshot is from, at the absolute latest this is from May 25, 2018. I'm pretty sure you can immediately see how flagrantly this flies in the face of the interview claim that overworld Pokemon weren't even a consideration until LGPE released and the feature was praised by audiences. Note that wording by the way: They explicitly say when LGPE released. That right there eliminates the possibility of some kind of internal focus testing for Let's Go in early 2018 or late 2017 yielding positive results from playtesters which inspired the SWSH team.
After thinking over any way to reconcile this massive contradiction I am only capable of concluding that Masuda & Ohmori either exaggerated or flat-out lied about this particular development detail in a misguided attempt to make Game Freak look better. No, this explanation doesn't sit right with me either, it seems just as weird and out of character as you think, but I only default to it because all the alternatives seem even more outlandish:
- The interviewee(s) had faulty info about development: Only believable if it was some relatively low ranking employee doing the deed, completely impossible for the main producer and director in unison.
- At some point between the May 25th build and LGPE's release they were somehow having so much trouble implementing overworld Pokemon they momentarily gave up only to get a second wind and work overtime to get it done, motivated by the reception to Let's Go: No. Just no. This is way too romantic and too late in the dev cycle to be realistic to me. If LGPE got it working fine while having to stick to Kanto map design, what could the SWSH team's problem have possibly been?
- The SWSH betas are an incredibly elaborate hoax: lol
Maybe they meant specifically for routes? Like, the wild area would have Pokemon wandering around, but the routes would have stuck to the traditional random encounter method.
Maybe? I'd need more detailed info on if the betas corroborate this tho, specifically the May 25 build. Cutting room floor's page on it leaves a lot to be desired
I'd like to propose a different vein of thought: that while Masuda & Ohmori's statement is untrue, it wasn't necessarily their fault that it was so.
Ultimately, this interview (and others) is marketing propaganda - TPC publishes such articles to promote their rose-tinted narrative of the franchise. For example, this article states things like "We always take player feedback into consideration" or "We always want to come up with new surprises for our players with each new Pokémon game. This is our first time introducing free camera movement in the series, so we're excited to see how our players will respond to it once they get their hands on the games". The first statement is flatly untrue, and the second is incredibly dumb beacuse every RPG that's not trying to emulate a retro style already has free-cam - there's nothing to learn from adding it.
Game development is, obviously, nothing like what they state. It's difficult, with lots of aggravation and conflict due to the nature of a collaborative project. Rarely do large studios not have issues with crunch culture and systemic abuse. GF's horrifically brutal 3 year dev cycle is a clear testament to this. It's sad, but it's reality. But, this is a reality that the TPC doesn't want publicized (obviously).
So what does that all mean? It could mean one of three things:
1) Masuda & Ohmori deliberately modified their statements in the interview beacuse they were conscious of the need to promote GF's image (as you've stated).
2) Masuda & Ohmori gave an interview, but TPC modified the interview statements to better fit their goals for Pokemon's public image.
3) Masuda & Ohmori never even given an interview, and the entire article was crafted by TPC for the purposes of advertisement.
Personally, I would assume it's one of the latter two. In interviews with outside individuals/media, the interviews are similarly rose-tinted, but they tend to always skirt around game development questions. Even when they get pressed on such questions such as Dexit, they'll only make vague statements. It's easier to spin the positives of features than it is to actively spin details on game development. Hence, they avoid it. But, in a vacuum where they can rewrite the narrative at their own leisure, they might be more willing to do so.
Ultimately, it's unlikely that we'll ever know what actually transpired. But, it's important to understand the context of this and future interviews. It's an advertisement, and should be thusly interpreted as such.
Yeah reading the interview I immediately assumed that it was referring to Pokemon roaming the actual routes, which makes more sense to me. Ofc always take any interview with any current employee of any company with a grain of salt.
So why does Porygon2 exist, anyway?
Porygon2 is one of the oldest Gen 2 Pokémon in concept, since an early design of it existed in the Gold SpaceWorld demo from 22nd November 1997... less than a month before Denno Senshi Porygon aired. In the intervening time between then and the games' release, why didn't someone go, "maybe we should cut this Pokémon so we can distance ourselves from this controversy?" Of course, this was before The Pokémon Company existed, so OLM probably weren't breathing down Game Freak's necks... which brings me to my next point.
Porygon has a cameo in Pokémon 4Ever, so what was stopping them from putting Porygon2 in the anime? From what I've heard about the Gen 2 anime, I'm starting to wonder if OLM had no idea it existed.
Porygon2 is one of the oldest Gen 2 Pokémon in concept, since an early design of it existed in the Gold SpaceWorld demo from 22nd November 1997... less than a month before Denno Senshi Porygon aired. In the intervening time between then and the games' release, why didn't someone go, "maybe we should cut this Pokémon so we can distance ourselves from this controversy?" Of course, this was before The Pokémon Company existed, so OLM probably weren't breathing down Game Freak's necks... which brings me to my next point.
Porygon has a cameo in Pokémon 4Ever, so what was stopping them from putting Porygon2 in the anime? From what I've heard about the Gen 2 anime, I'm starting to wonder if OLM had no idea it existed.
Honestly I don't think there's much overlap. It's it's a games=/=anime issue.
Porygon and its evolutions have been restricted to cameos in the anime, but there's nothing to indicate that it was ever intended to be suppressed in the games. Multiple trainers have used members of the line, even in GSC - it's not a hidden Pokemon no-one talks about - and it obviously got a further evolution in Gen IV (unlike Jynx which is a much more concrete case of TPC trying to avoid giving that Pokemon any prominence). It even got a community day in Pokemon Go, which I can say with some certainty Jynx will never have.
It was only ever Japan that really had an issue with Porygon, and that's why it has been kept out of the anime. While of course that filters through to the rest of the world, the controversy clearly didn't reach as far as the games. No one, afaik, has ever complained about Porygon being in the games - it's the anime that was specifically the problem.
Hell, if you want to get all conspiracy theorist about it, someone at Pokemon clearly agrees that the controversy was overblown (though the tweet being deleted makes me wonder who exactly this was posted by).
I would inquire if this was an interview that was officially published in English, or if it was a Japanese-only interview that non-official (relative to Pokemon) news outlets translated to publish about SwSh. The latter case would lend credence to a "lost in translation" take on that statement. Note that all the following I bring up is speculation since I do not know Japanese well enough to verify any myself.
For another example, there's been some recent interview lines circulating about FF16 where apparently a line about "The game is almost complete" that stems from a Japanese line closer to "The game is coming together very well" that someone I interacted with speculated was a misinterpretation to the effect of "the game has come together" or something similar. With that kind of example, I could see a mix up of "field" for a term more specifically referring to the routes at minimum, or even just way more translation-telephone changes of meaning in the interview that could snowball into such a misinterpretation: another proposal I have would be the statements of Let's Go "released" could be referring to a few things if mistranslated.
- Overworld Pokemon were always planned but was fine-tuned based on LGPE feedback
- The plan to release LGPE (i.e. the game getting to a state of being developed for a deadline instead of just an idea they bounce around but don't move ahead with), which could have happened much earlier than the formal release date, and then deciding "if we're doing it for this game why don't we do it for SwSh too?" In this case the positive reception would be because it was big in Go, leading to LGPE being made, rather than LGPE being positively received post-release suddenly prompting the feature
The interview was posted on Pokemon.com. It was kind of a brief aside.
Anyway it seems pretty obvious to me that they jsut meant the normal routes. The Wild Area was always being positioned as SWSH's big new thing and it was absolutely designed ground up to have Pokemon roaming around; the betas back this up.
Meanwhile the normal routes clearly aren't fully designed for having pokemon roaming around. They're often fairly cramped, not a ton of pokemon can spawn at once because they just over take your movement. And honestly most Pokemon kind of blend into route grass way more than in the wild area
Like this doesnt seem like a big fuck up mystery here
Anyway it seems pretty obvious to me that they jsut meant the normal routes. The Wild Area was always being positioned as SWSH's big new thing and it was absolutely designed ground up to have Pokemon roaming around; the betas back this up.
Meanwhile the normal routes clearly aren't fully designed for having pokemon roaming around. They're often fairly cramped, not a ton of pokemon can spawn at once because they just over take your movement. And honestly most Pokemon kind of blend into route grass way more than in the wild area
Like this doesnt seem like a big fuck up mystery here
I was just reminded of a question I posed on Bulbagarden a while ago: why is the Pokémon representation in Smash Bros. so limited in scope?
The only spinoffs to ever be represented in are Snap (ZERO-ONE trophy in Melee) and Detective Pikachu (spirit in Ultimate, but I'm guessing it was more to tie into the movie). It can't be because Smash Bros. focuses on the main series of video game franchises, or else there wouldn't be multiple Mario Kart stages. Additionally, the Pokémon spirits in Ultimate were almost all Pokémon species using their Dream World artwork, and non-playable humans rarely got trophies. The only Pokémon items are Poké Balls. Is The Pokémon Company really overprotective of how the brand is represented in crossovers?
The only spinoffs to ever be represented in are Snap (ZERO-ONE trophy in Melee) and Detective Pikachu (spirit in Ultimate, but I'm guessing it was more to tie into the movie). It can't be because Smash Bros. focuses on the main series of video game franchises, or else there wouldn't be multiple Mario Kart stages. Additionally, the Pokémon spirits in Ultimate were almost all Pokémon species using their Dream World artwork, and non-playable humans rarely got trophies. The only Pokémon items are Poké Balls. Is The Pokémon Company really overprotective of how the brand is represented in crossovers?
It's likely exactly that, yes. I'm fairly sure Sakurai's named them at one point or another as a company that he has to work very closely with.
Some IP holders are more of a pain than others.
ZERO-One trophy and the Stadiums probably get to be the only special exceptions because HAL Labs were the ones who helped create Smash 64 & Melee.
Although with Pokemon I think "the only items" being Pokeballs, an entire subset of items that has dedicated summons for that one single series, is a bit underselling what they're getting in return lol.
Here's another fun aspect to what can only be considered their strange regulations: Brawl's stickers & Ultimate's Spirits all generally use the stock art you'd expect so you'd expect Pokemon to use Sugimori artwork but...no!
In Brawl every single Pokemon sticker is a render of the model used in the game and in Ultimate's base game all (except for Detective Pikachu) used the "pokemon center" artwork and neither Red or Leaf got to have their artwork and just have their smash renders. The post-release Let's Go spirits were the first time they used any artwork for the games and the SWSH Spirit Event was the first time Sugimori's artwork was used in Smash at all.
Here's my thinking:
- Start with the Japanese Version (V1).
- US gets V1 & translates into English (V2).
- UK get V2 & translates it into all other languages (V3).
- V3 starts getting packed for UK as copies are sent to other countries.
- Other countries get V3 though by then some changes have been demanded and are made (V4).
Normal fish and bugs have been mostly retconned out at this point now that we have a decent amount of fish and Bug-type Pokemon. They also notably try to ignore showing or mentioning meat whenever they cam, though in instances they can't they do imply Pokemon (or at least Pokemon parts) are eaten. Of course they never go into detail about how Pokemon are prepared for legal consumption.
In what terms do you mean by your second question?
If you mean what happens in a normal battle when a Wild Pokemon faints, I always imagined the Pokemon's HP isn't how much life it has but rather how much energy it's willing to expend battling before turning running away (and a trainer's Pokemon understands when a Pokemon reaches that point the battle is over).
If you're talking about Pokemon who appear in the Time Rifts, I imagine they're just teleported back to the time and place they were teleported from.
While I wouldn't put it pass Masuda (and Ohmori) to lie to make GF look good, at the same time there's no reason to lie about something like this.
The only thing I can think of is that what we're seeing in the screenshot is them testing out special encounters, Pokemon who would appear on the overworld. If what they say is true, I could still see those Pokemon having been originally planned but when Let's Go took off and people liked seeing Pokemon roaming around they made it so the Wild Area would not only have those special Pokemon walking around but grass/water/sand would generate Pokemon to wander round like they did in Let's Go. They don't consider the special Pokemon to be the same as the grass spawn Pokemon.
Yup,
You'll also note that the Brawl Stickers and Ultimate Spirits are only of Pokemon except for Red & Leaf; no other trainer artwork (and while I get why, they could pair a notable trainer with their ace Pokemon).
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It could also be they just don't remember things properly. It's pretty easy to see a line from "We ought to do overworld pokes at some point, but it's too hard...Oh people really liked Go, we should look at overworld pokes again...seems difficult, but we're going to try adding it to Let's Go and Gen 8...Okay people really liked that part of Let's Go, we're keeping them in all future games" get misremembered 4 years later as "people loved them in Lets Go so we added them to SwSh." Especially with how much things shift during development in general, I think there's a lot of wiggle room before I'd call anything a lie.
I'll add that for Brawl, all of the stickers were of the in-game renders of the models used. For Ultimate, they used the Pokemon Global Link/ Dream World artwork for all base game spirits except Red, Leaf, and Detective Pikachu. The Sw/Sh spirits added later used the Sugimori official art instead.
This gets into a separate question of "Would Game Freak have eventually done overworld Pokemon without the influence of Go?". While obviously we can't ever know for sure, my current inclination is a fairly solid "Yes". Maybe it would've taken a game or 2 longer, but in the end I can't help but feel like actually showing Pokemon living and inhabiting the world was bound to happen as hardware advanced and the company got more to grips with 3D design and how it could be used to make the world of Pokemon feel more and more alive, to say nothing of the broader shift of the JRPG genre away from random encounters.
If this is the case I reckon they would've been a bit more specific, no? "We originally only had a few fixed spawns in the Wild Area but after LGPE's reception we expanded the scope of overworld Pokemon significantly". Then again the said can be said for the "not originally on standard routes" idea, so...
In fact, now that I think about it I don't even buy into that hypothesis anymore. While often rudimentary the SWSH routes do have instances of fixed Pokemon encounters with special behaviors which seems like something very much deliberately thought out from the onset of design: My main two examples are the Route 2 island Obstagoon and the Route 8 Falinks that march through the tunnels. Yeah at this point I'm rolling with BlizzardHero's hypothesis this interview is bogus lol.
Interviews are as much preplanned as they are off the cuff, it's very reasonable to not being super detailed about the timelines and full scope of intent
Stuff like Falinks and the Crustle on Route 8 are probably more exceptions that were always planned (osbtagoon, meanwhile, is just out there, that coudl haev been anyone. There's nothing really special going on there. Same goes for having one random crawdaunt in some of the water ways). They have been experimenting with things like this for a while: from the phenemona that happens in Gen 5 & 6 to stuff like berry piles, rustling trees and especially Wimpod in gen 7. So taking that root, and already experimenting with the Wild Area as it is, and applying extra special encounters to other routes, makes sense. Little bits of flavor, like how you can see Woobat flying about in the lower levels of the Mine. Meanwhile have you tried to move through the rest of Route 8?
It is the most cramped area in the game and that works when you're just going through occasional patches of grasses and getting a few random encounters. It does not work when there's like 4 encounters in a 2x2 area and also some of hte Pokemon have aggressive AI to chase you and large hit boxes.
Similar vibes apply to Route 9: the maze like ice floes and "swimming laps" Grapploct mesh well together when there's no OW encounters. That was probabyl designed with intent as well. The rest of the pokemon that can spawn around route 9 are not so well integrated at all, making it hard to see if there's even a pokemon out there at times (and if so, which ones are there) and getting in the way but not in a "designed" way.
And these are bookended by routes that have no sort of special encounters but do have very cramped design space for the Pokemon in them.
Stuff like Falinks and the Crustle on Route 8 are probably more exceptions that were always planned (osbtagoon, meanwhile, is just out there, that coudl haev been anyone. There's nothing really special going on there. Same goes for having one random crawdaunt in some of the water ways). They have been experimenting with things like this for a while: from the phenemona that happens in Gen 5 & 6 to stuff like berry piles, rustling trees and especially Wimpod in gen 7. So taking that root, and already experimenting with the Wild Area as it is, and applying extra special encounters to other routes, makes sense. Little bits of flavor, like how you can see Woobat flying about in the lower levels of the Mine. Meanwhile have you tried to move through the rest of Route 8?
It is the most cramped area in the game and that works when you're just going through occasional patches of grasses and getting a few random encounters. It does not work when there's like 4 encounters in a 2x2 area and also some of hte Pokemon have aggressive AI to chase you and large hit boxes.
Similar vibes apply to Route 9: the maze like ice floes and "swimming laps" Grapploct mesh well together when there's no OW encounters. That was probabyl designed with intent as well. The rest of the pokemon that can spawn around route 9 are not so well integrated at all, making it hard to see if there's even a pokemon out there at times (and if so, which ones are there) and getting in the way but not in a "designed" way.
And these are bookended by routes that have no sort of special encounters but do have very cramped design space for the Pokemon in them.
I think that without Go, at the very least we still get Legends: Arceus. That calls more from Breath of the Wild than Go, after all. And after L:A being so well-received, probably they don't do Overworld in SV if they didn't do it in SwSh* because time frame, but they probably get really determined to integrate it into Gen 10.
*With the exception of things like Wimpod, legendaries, Kalos Route 13, etc that R_N mentioned and would have gotten similar mons in SV
There's Team Rocket Mii Costume as DLC, but I agree humans from Pokemon reps are pretty rare. Not complaining though since Pokemon is about the creatures so I wont ask more.