I did think about using Aether Paradise instead of VPC.
Aether Paradise still clears.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
I did think about using Aether Paradise instead of VPC.
Aether Paradise still clears.
Funny how they completely gave up when designing the Elite Four teams. First E4 Sinnoh member vs First E4 Alola member, what are we even doing...
Come on bro, if you are going to compare them, at least do a good job.
Heres Hala's USUM fight, which is honestly decently good.
And here's Aaron's DP fight, maybe better then hala's in terms of move choices but also it has a dustox and beautifly...
I would say the best thing is to compare Aaron's Platinum and Hala's USUM elite four fights, and they are pretty on par with each other.
Okay, fair. I jumped into a conversation without previous context so thats my b. But for the point quoted, idk why we are comparing an updated game with a vanilla game, thats like comparing apples to oranges (and as much as I love SM, its elite four are very easy, USUM its a decent bit more difficult).
I do have to wonder why Gamefreak really loved giving endgame trainers all of 2 attacks. Like I’d get it if it was a gimmick set that spams one single attack like Head Smash because that’s the entire point, but on an elite 4 member?
I've got what's clearly an actually unpopular opinion here: Gen 1 was good, actually.
I'm not saying it's the best generation or that it's above reproach. Yes, the type chart was poorly set up. No, the multiplayer doesn't have much to offer compared to virtually any other generation except maybe 2 (and then only because stalling is so miserable). But even though it had a small roster, it was interesting to explore. The story works. The dungeons are all big and mostly interesting to explore (Seafoam and the Mansion are a bit sloggy but hey).
I can understand the people who go "Gen 1 aren't very good Pokemon games" because yeah, there's lots of ways that the sequels have iterated on the series. But to me it's like saying "The original Legend of Zelda isn't good because it's old". It's fantastic, actually, it's just not one of the better Zelda games because "fantastic" is the franchise average, not the peak. It's the same thing here. Those games blew up like crazy for a reason, and it's not because humanity didn't know any better.
I'm not saying it's the best generation or that it's above reproach. Yes, the type chart was poorly set up. No, the multiplayer doesn't have much to offer compared to virtually any other generation except maybe 2 (and then only because stalling is so miserable). But even though it had a small roster, it was interesting to explore. The story works. The dungeons are all big and mostly interesting to explore (Seafoam and the Mansion are a bit sloggy but hey).
I can understand the people who go "Gen 1 aren't very good Pokemon games" because yeah, there's lots of ways that the sequels have iterated on the series. But to me it's like saying "The original Legend of Zelda isn't good because it's old". It's fantastic, actually, it's just not one of the better Zelda games because "fantastic" is the franchise average, not the peak. It's the same thing here. Those games blew up like crazy for a reason, and it's not because humanity didn't know any better.
USUM does a better job handling movesets. Molayne replaces Hala in the Elite Four though and his team is better composed. Sth funny about it is that he packs Metagross and you'd expect that would be his ace, except it's Alolan Dugtrio, a mon you commonly find and beat in caves. DP Lucian is the same with Bronzong, and yet that one was tough to handle bc tanky stats + being massively overleveled + calm mind set; they still replaced his ace to Gallade in Platinum though. I'm saying this because I often hear people find him more difficult in DP than Plat.
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Eh I'm totally fine conceding that trainer bosses aren't really Alola's strong suit. As far as USUM is concerned the highlights are Hala, Gladion 1 and Hau 6, all early-to-mid game encounters, with things steadily tapering off from there. Lillie has no battles and both Alola games' Champion teams are nothing special. There are worse games at this but clearly they speced out the hardest on the Totem fights
What I find frustrating about Gen 7 boss trainer design is the really blunt use of EVs right from the beginning. In older games, the lack of EVs (and very gradual introduction of IVs) gives players a psychological boost, because their mons can often overcome level disadvantages with their secretly superior stats. In Alola, this is reversed: you're expected to turn on the Exp Share and be constantly overlevelled, but for most of the early game the major opponents have strictly better stats than your mons. I appreciate the effort to boost difficulty, but it's kinda demoralising!
Here's an example calc from SM Hala's Grand Trial:
Lvl 15 16 SpA 15 IVs Popplio Disarming Voice vs. Lvl 14 252 HP / 252 SpD Makuhita: 12-16 (21 - 28%) -- 12.6% chance to 4HKO
And here's the same calc without EVs and with 15 IVs across the board instead of the actual 31/31/15/15/31/15 spread:
Lvl 15 16 SpA 15 IVs Popplio Disarming Voice vs. Lvl 14 0 HP 15 IVs / 0 SpD 15 IVs Makuhita: 22-26 (47.8 - 56.5%) -- 75% chance to 2HKO
It's a pretty huge difference and it messes with your intuition as a player. I don't have the stats at hand right now, but iirc Totem Pokemon have more precisely calibrated spreads which feel less egregious.
Yeah thats a part of the beauty of the games as well, people are looking for/value different things in the games and there’s (almost) always something for everyone and is why opinions will vary so much on games.
I mean, before that people were complaining about difficulty being too easy. So, they can’t win either way. Makes logical sense to me anyway that these trainers would have properly EV’d their Pokemon.
I think it might to be avoid AI jank? Can't have the AI spamming a resisted non-stab move over their super effective STAB because of something weird in the code if they don't have a non-stab move to spam.
Because my point was that even a game that is usually lauded by fans for its difficulty and challenge factor, and doesn’t have the excuse of “it’s the weaker first go-around; the devs have had ample time to go over it and assess its shortcomings” still has sections of the game that are more thoughtlessly designed in terms of providing friction than a game from the “GF baby mode” era that is that generation’s weaker first go-around.
To reiterate, I’m not saying that Platinum doesn’t obviously and thoroughly surpass Sun & Moon in other areas when it comes to difficulty. What I’m saying is that people don’t really evaluate these things holistically; they just blanketly say something like “Platinum was harder than these modern games.” And to an extent I understand that, because realistically no one wants to pore over every NPC moveset and EV spread and more theoretical factors like item distribution throughout the game in order to determine which one is truly “more difficult.”
But while I have no problem admitting that I think there are aspects of the more modern games’ difficulty have been deliberately sanded down, and that something that is understandably appealing to some people has been lost in that process, I feel it is remiss to not also account for the fluctuations in difficulty that stem from 1) there being more jank in the older games, 2) us not being clueless 11-year-olds anymore lmao, and 3) Game Freak actually improving on their approach to game design in other areas, with that last one typically being the most controversial because people have this impression that “Modern GF” are just always bad, have no juice when it comes to game design, and only care about making the games impossible for even a 2-year-old to fail at. But if that were universally true, I wouldn’t be able to make the argument that the 2D side-scroller homage Spikemuth’s Team Yell bozos have stronger team choices like Drapion and Scrafty and Weavile than labyrinthine GOAT dungeon Mt. Coronet’s Team Galactic bozos who are still coming at you with the same old Stunky and Glameow mix right before the climax of the game, even in the better and tougher and more polished edition of the game.
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A side effect of this is that it interferes with using matching levels as a self-imposed challenge. The level curve for gen 7 bosses is flat enough that matching on one boss can easily leave a mon slightly overlevelled for the next one from required fights. Like, I want to take fights on roughly equal footing, not be awkwardly a couple levels behind just so I can use this team again. It gets really silly at the end of USUM: you have access to level 60 wild mons in time for Necrozma also at 60, but then it takes all the way to the champion to get back up there (Ribombee is 55, Hapu's best is 54, Gladion's is 55, the Elite Four have 57s).
My devil's advocate reply there would be that SM came after Platinum, so they had multiple generations of additional reference for designing boss difficulty, even without specifically iterating on Alola's choices of bosses.
For a point of consideration, Aaron's team includes at least a few token countermeasures for Bug's weaknesses (Stone Edge and Ice Fang for Flyers or some Fire, Iron Head lays into Rocks), while Hala's entire team gets facerolled by a Fairy Pokemon considering they have literally two moves that can hit them neutrally. A token Poison Jab in the free moveslots would alleviate this in a few cases, and unlike Aaron's team, literally everything is weak to the Standard Fighting Weaknesses with no basic variance (Drapion shares none, and two at least have counter measures to Rock while Scizor is not weak to Fighting). Hala just looks like they grabbed 5 Fighting types instead of considering "okay how do we stop a player from rolling this over with literally any Fairy Pokemon or Super Effective attack?" considering both are pretty easy to come by in Alola.
Could you elaborate on this, i mean i dont really like pokemons battle system as it is but i thought the totems were fine enough bosses.
I'm a filthy stall player, I like my status effects. Now, the thing about status effects in RPGs is that they're almost never used for basic fights. The kind of thing that wouldn't require any thought anyway, so you're going to pick the fast option every time. So it's extra important that they matter a lot for boss fights, because that's their only use case.
To Pokemon's credit, they do alleviate this issue: the catching mechanics are a pretty good argument to keep a move like Thunder Wave around even for basic random encounters. But those same mechanics preclude things like damage-over-time or Defense debuffs from being relevant against wild mons.
So back to bosses. A lot of the debuffs you can apply are pretty powerful, limited by the fact that they need to be reapplied on a new mon and would potentially reset on switch if the AI did that more than once in a blue moon. They need to be this good to be relevant in PvP. But that's a problem for a single-mon boss. It's not really a great climax to have e.g., Gastly use Curse and the remaning 3-4 turns of the fight be a formality.
I do have to give Gen 7 some credit on this front. It acknowledges that status is a reasonable strategy (shoutouts to the forced encounter at the Trainer's school that will tell you exactly where to find a mon that can poison). A couple of the totems have status-curing berries, both implying that the devs expected the player to attempt status and being a fair obstacle that doesn't invalidate going for status.
But, on the other hand, you have fights like Ultra Necrozma. Fights where the enemy mon is capable of sweeping through a team without allowing a single turn of player action. Because ultimately, that level of lethality is completely necessary. It has no defenses against status at all. That one turn the player might get could be Toxic, or Curse, or Topsy-Turvy, or Endeavor, or any other of the completely intended ways to ensure one mon can't solo a full team. Of course, you can't counter everything with only four moveslots, so these fights end up being more of a check of which mons a player happens to have than feeling skill-based. It comes off as fake difficulty, brought about because as soon as the player starts doing anything beyond just attacking, it can't actually have real difficulty.
Again, gen 7 is mostly tolerable on this front. Or at least it was the first time I was playing it. I bring it up in the discussion of grouping generations into eras because it became a lot more painful in hindsight for me. The jank was there, I much would have preferred gym leaders, but at least status was an option. Gens 8 and 9 are a lot less willing to let players ruin their hype moments/ use mechanics at the logical time to use them. I mean, look at the Starmobiles: hardcoded stats, complete status immunity, infinite PP. None of those band-aids would have been necessary if they had stuck with trainer fights. I group gen 7 with 8 and 9 rather than 6 on this aspect because I feel like this is closer to what they were aiming for with the Totems, they just weren't as willing to throw out the system yet.
I don’t know if this is necessarily an unpopular opinion; it strikes me as something that could perhaps be a little contestable though: For all the critiquing of the new Mega designs (plenty of which has come from me), I actually really like that Game Freak never really “go back” on a design once it’s out there. I would think it would be pretty easy — compelling, even — for them to look at the fan response to something like, say, Garbodor back in 2010 or the response to Mega Pyroar and Feraligatr now and decide to overhaul their designs to make them more appealing.
I almost find it a little odd that I’d feel this way because usually I am entirely open to breaking rules and practices that are considered precious in art, so a seemingly conservative position like “I don’t think GF should ever significantly rework a design” is an unusual place for me to land. I am fine with the idea of making small tweaks to a design (like how Pikachu has been altered over time — though I also think there’s an extent to which designs will just naturally fluctuate due to larger changes in hardware and presentation, and that’s unavoidable), as well as changing things like stats or even Shiny colors. But even though I’m not really a fan of how they went about designing Mega Pyroar, I don’t think I’d want them to just scrap it entirely and have a do-over.
Despite my extremely progressive stances on art and my willingness to hold almost nothing sacred, I do think there is also something to be said for standing by your choices even if they’re unpopular. Although, even then, there are some obvious exceptions — I think it was the right decision to recolor Jynx, for instance. You don’t want to be so deep in the trenches for your art that you refuse to listen to criticism that accurately identifies it as harmful. On a less serious level, I also think it’s important to be amenable to criticism about elements like game design, if enough people are telling you that something feels bad to play. But something like a Pokémon looking “dumb” or “underwhelming” is just a matter of taste, and I appreciate that Game Freak have never gotten caught up in trying to forcibly make a released Pokémon “more likable” by changing its essence. Spinning off from an existing design, like by adding a Mega Evolution or a regional form for it, is one thing, because those designs can coexist. But erasing the existing Fearow or Seel and replacing them with a new version is something I don’t think I’d want them to ever do.
I almost find it a little odd that I’d feel this way because usually I am entirely open to breaking rules and practices that are considered precious in art, so a seemingly conservative position like “I don’t think GF should ever significantly rework a design” is an unusual place for me to land. I am fine with the idea of making small tweaks to a design (like how Pikachu has been altered over time — though I also think there’s an extent to which designs will just naturally fluctuate due to larger changes in hardware and presentation, and that’s unavoidable), as well as changing things like stats or even Shiny colors. But even though I’m not really a fan of how they went about designing Mega Pyroar, I don’t think I’d want them to just scrap it entirely and have a do-over.
Despite my extremely progressive stances on art and my willingness to hold almost nothing sacred, I do think there is also something to be said for standing by your choices even if they’re unpopular. Although, even then, there are some obvious exceptions — I think it was the right decision to recolor Jynx, for instance. You don’t want to be so deep in the trenches for your art that you refuse to listen to criticism that accurately identifies it as harmful. On a less serious level, I also think it’s important to be amenable to criticism about elements like game design, if enough people are telling you that something feels bad to play. But something like a Pokémon looking “dumb” or “underwhelming” is just a matter of taste, and I appreciate that Game Freak have never gotten caught up in trying to forcibly make a released Pokémon “more likable” by changing its essence. Spinning off from an existing design, like by adding a Mega Evolution or a regional form for it, is one thing, because those designs can coexist. But erasing the existing Fearow or Seel and replacing them with a new version is something I don’t think I’d want them to ever do.
It would be so easy to run every new design by a focus group to prematurely weed out unpopular ones, but Game Freak doesn't seem to be interested in that. Every new batch of Pokemon always has a bunch where people just go "what the fuck were they thinking with this one, it's so stupid". And I respect the hell out of that.
Though on the other hand, I do wish Game Freak wouldn't feel so pressured to avoid overlap with fan-made designs. I get it's to avoid potential legal issues, but man, it must feel bad working at Game Freak and having to scrap a design you're proud of because it's too similar to one of a fan's. The fan is just in it for the love of the game, and I get the feeling the folks at Game Freak wish they could be as well.
I can't speak for everyone, but there are very few Pokémon designs I actively dislike. I definitely don't vibe with some, but I don't find myself going "this is awful" too often. I feel like some credit needs to be given there, at least.
thank goodness dp gave us full movesets, so we could preserve double team, non-technician non-stab quick attack, defend order vespiquen, and drapion that prefers bug coverage and Aerial Ace over dark stab
in serious, we shouldn’t hold up these old gen movesets as good design when they use their Full Movesets ™ to dump trash. the crabominable has a better designed moveset than yanmega and maybe drapion, and i’d add vespiquen here too if not for the cute novelty of its order gimmick
Eh, only if if were a choice item set a limited moveset would be preferable, like some BDSP sets do. If not, there's no excuse why these "elite trainers" pack only 2 moves. Even a Quick Attack might seem filler until it picks off your Pokemon in the red (that's how Hau's Raichu got me lol). Could they have picked better choices? Yes, but at least they're filling slots with SOMETHING.
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real talk, if you want well designed movesets, you may as well just ask for them, rather than setting out a 'good option' with insane nonsense like double team and unstabbed aerial ace covering 0 applicable weaknesses or resistances. a 'filling slots with SOMETHING' sense implies that you'll accept crap and are accepting crap - why not just go for broke and ask for good design beyond these two middling entries.
these dp choices have 'no excuse' too. but realistically it matters little, both for the dp guys and the sm guys, because the basic most important most effective options they'll click 99% of the time are there. i want a design approach more interesting and insightful than stab(s) + 1 coverage move, which is the primary ethos of both of these teams
Eh, I think wack coverage moves like Aerial Ace are important. In-game NPCs teams don't exist in a vacuum, so their moves should fill holes not just in their own teams or individual Pokemon, but across every other NPC team as well.
To continue using Alola as an example, you can see this with everything there running Crunch. In theory, Crunch is a perfectly fine move on each individual Pokemon, since it's a good catch-all neutral option for when their STABs are resisted. In practice, it feels like every trainer in Alola is conspiring to fuck over Decidueye specifically. If a bunch of those trainers had swapped out Crunch with some other coverage move, the game would be more balanced in who it messes with (at the very least slap Poison Jab and Brick Break onto more random shit).
Most Pokemon bosses are not very good bosses, and that has little to do with how their teams match people's notion of 'good' Pokemon sets. A single player RPG and competitive PvP are as different as contexts can get. In an RPG meant to get people acquainted with the mechanics and possibilities, a boss should reward problem solving beyond brute force:
It speaks to a broader problem with Pokemon design: how do you create endgame challenges that match expectations AND feel fair? Well, you can't. Optimized sets are not fun to play against; I'm not having fun when my less-than-stellar Bug- or Grass-type, which has handled the game okay so far, now can't answer any Fighting-type because they'll always have Rock coverage or Water-type because they'll always have Ice Beam, respectively. Earlier games (RBY and GSC) were deliberate with their League level spikes; the numbers were intimidating, but the sets were built around something more interesting that 'kill you dead, now.' There's room to exploit their gaps. Level caps have poisoned people's minds a bit; there's no need to grind to make the battle 'fair' when AI is already at a huge disadvantage, whether by team design or tech limitation.
Ultimately, I'd like to see more critique of how bosses play out in practice, rather than 'I was browsing Bulbapedia and saw there were empty slots here so clearly Pokemon is now for dumb babies'. How often does a Pokemon demonstrate more than two moves before fainting, anyway? More is not inherently more.
- RBY Brock's Onix is good because it affirms the power of your starter's elemental move and can be overcome with physical attackers via smart use of stat-lowering moves and playing around Bide.
- Whitney's Miltank is good because Rollout provides inevitability that Potion spam can't negate.
- Mars's Purugly is good because it's at a significant stat advantage and gets free damage.
- Cynthia's Garchomp is the brutest force of all as an overstatted pseudo with good coverage, encouraging you to set up for it beforehand rather than take her team one KO at a time.
It speaks to a broader problem with Pokemon design: how do you create endgame challenges that match expectations AND feel fair? Well, you can't. Optimized sets are not fun to play against; I'm not having fun when my less-than-stellar Bug- or Grass-type, which has handled the game okay so far, now can't answer any Fighting-type because they'll always have Rock coverage or Water-type because they'll always have Ice Beam, respectively. Earlier games (RBY and GSC) were deliberate with their League level spikes; the numbers were intimidating, but the sets were built around something more interesting that 'kill you dead, now.' There's room to exploit their gaps. Level caps have poisoned people's minds a bit; there's no need to grind to make the battle 'fair' when AI is already at a huge disadvantage, whether by team design or tech limitation.
Ultimately, I'd like to see more critique of how bosses play out in practice, rather than 'I was browsing Bulbapedia and saw there were empty slots here so clearly Pokemon is now for dumb babies'. How often does a Pokemon demonstrate more than two moves before fainting, anyway? More is not inherently more.