u know I've been playing and playing and I've reached the conclusion that I actually don't like the pokemon games (main anyway). They're short, boring, lacking in substance, lacking in plot, graphics, and character development. Maybe I've just outgrown them x-x
UR OPINION IS BAD AND U SHOULD FEEL BAD!
...not! It's perfectly fine to feel that way. Maybe you just need to take a break? Even great stuff gets stale if overplayed.
But there are other reasons to get dissatisfied with the in-game. I've touched on this before, but the main point the developers are trying to deliver the player is the thrill of discovery. So the games are meant to be like a giant bug hunt. Remember taking a glass jar and a butterfly net to your backyard and turning over every rock? That's the "joy" the games are going for, everything else is secondary.
Everything else.
Which means that the biggest flaws of discovery games plague the entire series:
1. The internet. Unless I go whole hog to avoid spoilers, I'll never have that same feeling as playing this in '98.
2. Replay-ability. Once you've "discovered" everything (either in-game or out, i.e. internet) there's not as much to do anymore.
3. Difficulty delivered by lack of information. I'll get back to this later.
Another flaw is that while the competitive metagame is really really fun (it's essentially speed chess with monsters), the gap between in-game play and metagame is GIGANTIC. Just imagine how much the in-game difficulty would change if 1. Most trainers had 6 pokemon, 2. Most trainers had type diversity, 3. Most trainers SWITCHED pokemon. Any one of those would dramatically change the in-game.
But it's not that simple. Since the overall goal of pokemon games (in developer terms) is exploration, the games are pretty tough... if you go in blind.
Whitney's Miltank is my ur example of this. She's super hard if you go in blind because she's a snowball-effect boss. If you let the snowball build-up (rollout) then you get plowed over and can't do anything. Which will typically happen if you don't know what rollout does because you have no time to fool around, gotta stop the snowball-effect! But if you know what you're doing (use a rock type to wall it or one of the few fighting types, boost with X-items on the Clefairy phase) then she's nothing special, since you never give her the opportunity to build the snowball. So informed people find her super easy, while newbies find her notoriously hard.
Silver was hard for me because I had no idea what I was doing. I kept switching my in-game team based on what brand new thing I found, which kept my level curve low since trainer experience was leaking to worthless mons like Ledyba. Then I did my research and plotted out what 6 pokemon I'd use in my in-game run and it became super easy. I can only really get a thrill by placing difficulty factors on myself, like a nuzlocke run. Unfortunately, you can't really design a game assuming your audience will be experts going in, so the very premise of Pokemon becomes its undoing the more you learn.
I still think there is some happy medium between "Super easy if you have a plan" and "EVERY GAME IS OU!" But bugger if I know how.
