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Unpopular opinions

I spy with my little eye, a group of Pokémon fans talking about battle facilities. Oh, boy. This is gonna be good.

So, the Battle Frontier. It's a cool enough place, I guess. Most of the games don't have one, and it helps Emerald, Platinum, and HGSS all stick out amongst the crowd a bit more. So what's the problem here? Well, this wouldn't be the "unpopular opinions" thread without some flaming hot takes, so here's one to chew on. ahem

Not only do I think Gen 4 and especially Pokémon Emerald to be hard-carried by the Frontier's implementation, but I also believe the Frontier as a whole to be a flawed, if not outright bad case of jRPG game design.

Let's take a look at what these facilities have in store for players. There's usually a Battle Tower... which every single region also has its own version of somewhere. There's the Battle Factory, which randomizes Pokémon for the player... there's the Pyramid in Emerald's iteration which plays unique, I guess, but even that bears striking similarities at points to Black & White 2's version-exclusive tower/forest facility, and at least there you can actually keep the experience points you gain. Most of the other facilities I can't even remember the names of because they're just that forgettable. People say they like the Frontier, but at the end of the day, there's nothing either version of it offers that the player can't try and re-create and/or find elsewhere across the main series. The things that are exclusive to the Frontier, on the other hand, have a tendency of promoting luck over player skill and training etiquette to an almost unhealthy degree. Heck, the Battle Arena can be argued to be a form of battling and gambling simultaneously, and we already know how they felt about the Game Corner.

The game that really got everyone fired up about this was Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire. It was bad enough that the developers teased us at the Battle Resort, but certainly, after being in both the original Hoenn games (Emerald) and a remake (HGSS), certainly ORAS, a Hoenn remake, would also have the Frontier. We all know how the story ends, but despite this, my personal enjoyment of ORAS wasn't decreased. In fact, I'd actually say the Frontier being removed in ORAS was a good thing, because at least then the developers had to ask themselves "what can we offer to the player as compensation for its absense?" ORAS may not have a Battle Frontier, but that's one very small nitpick that in my eyes, opens up room for a much more complete and fresh version of Hoenn overall with new additions such as Soaring, the DexNav, and new Mega Evolutions, the latter of which I also hate in multiplayer but enjoy in single player.
 
bdt2002 said:
but even that bears striking similarities at points to Black & White 2's version-exclusive tower/forest facility, and at least there you can actually keep the experience points you gain.
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I'm really struggling to figure out how this is an important distinction. The facilities are designed to test the player's teams after they have already been optimized. By the time you are seriously working on a facility, there's effectively nothing left that Exp on your main team is useful for.
 
The EXP and Money part of Black Tower/White Treehollow is irrelevant to the topic of facilities, and they differ in other ways that weigh significantly on the format compared to to the Battle Pyramid.

First and foremost your team's levels aren't regulated with the Mons as they are in Battle facilities, so outleveling most of the challenge is entirely an option even on Challenge mode, which can neuter the Gauntlet structure when you can brute force through opponents without suffering any attrition to recover from. While locked out of regular item usage, you have the ability to move held items around your team between battles, allowing you to bring resources from the outside for the Gauntlet like Choice items to facilitate mowing down opponents or Leftovers/Berries to heal Chip damage, whereas the Battle Pyramid locks you out of even those with the Pyramid specific bag. Tower/Tree allow Shift Battle style, Facilities never do, yet another mark in the player's favor for what is supposed to be a limited resource endurance set up. Pyramid has Wild Pokemon to contend with and no guarantee of healing resources like the Doctor trainer. Finally, the Pyramid limits you to 3 Pokemon vs bringing your full team of 6 for BW TreeTower, doubling your number of bodies for the challenge.

Frankly the resemblance between the two facilities is superficial at best on the front of "move around a non-straightforward environment without free resource access", but the Battle Pyramid is structured to limit and drain your resources while discouraging brute force attempts due to a combination of those limits and the level curve. Frankly I never even thought of the B2W2 areas as Facility stand-ins like I did the Subway or PWT, because they make so many concessions that the Facilities have limited since they debuted with the Gen 2 tower as to undercut the difficulty factor those mechanics were implemented for.
 
Battle Facilities are the only reason to play single-player Pokemon post-GSC.
bdt2002 said:
People say they like the Frontier, but at the end of the day, there's nothing either version of it offers that the player can't try and re-create and/or find elsewhere across the main series. The things that are exclusive to the Frontier, on the other hand, have a tendency of promoting luck over player skill and training etiquette to an almost unhealthy degree.
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???

How exactly would I recreate the Factory, the Arena, the Palace, the Dome, the Pike, the Hall in USUM? People largely weren't even willing to recreate the Battle Tower using the Gen8 Battle Tower (which doesn't have streaks anymore), which was at least thinkable.

The Frontier isn't luck over skill. If anything, the Tower is, because the win rates of teams winning 3000 in a row are so indistinguishable that luck makes the main difference between reaching 1500 and 3000.
Heck, the Battle Arena can be argued to be a form of battling and gambling simultaneously, and we already know how they felt about the Game Corner.
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There are established Arena strategies that allow you to beat Greta Gold with NUs. (I only got to 45 or so personally, but I didn't use the best team.) It's far from the most luck-based facility (that would be the Factory).
 
misterdarvus said:
Also, GF did less with Battle Facilities lately, because Online PvP is even more prevalent now. And lets say it will replace offline battle facilities
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They could make the Battle Facilities PvP. They'd have to get creative with some of them, like I'd imagine Gen III's Pike and Pyramid would be more of a race thing, but I think most could easily be made into a multiplayer competition.
 
Always hard to tell what's an Unpopular opinion (at least beyond simply not being a 50%+ Majority) or a topic that hasn't been covered in the past by myself or someone else. That said to share one, I'm finding I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of recent Pokemon designs in the context of being monster/creature designs, even if I do like the designs themselves standalone.

The best way I can put it is that a lot of the "populous" speeches, like ones you know exist in a significant population rather than being very rare or specific entities like Legendaries, are starting to feel a bit too "distinct" if that makes any sense? Like I look at some Pokemon designs such as Incineroar, Decidueye, or Cinderace and I don't think of them as a member of a species. They feel like a singular monster that would be a Party member or an NPC in another RPG, where they at most have small distinguishing traits in case you meet other members of their race to compare (like Kimahri and the Ronso in Final Fantasy X). I think this can work to an extent with the Legendaries or Pokemon who simply don't occur frequently enough in the wild, such as Dusknoir style trade evolutions or things like the Birds/Beasts/Golems, but for the Starters or certain wild species who as a premise there must exist several of, something about that design approach doesn't quite jive in my brain.

Admittedly this is a tricky line to walk since the most I can lay this on is a vibe and maybe the level of detail in each Mon, and this isn't really objective as an issue anyway, but it's something I keep finding myself saying when I wonder why some new designs aren't clicking with me like the older ones could. This also might come from a bit of bias because I have to acknowledge that this was something some games actively employed with the Pokemon, perhaps most notably the Mystery Dungeon series, which walks an even murkier line between the Pokemon as random creatures/species and as highly individualized beings under systems that don't tend to include nicknaming for most of them
 
pika pal said:
Always hard to tell what's an Unpopular opinion (at least beyond simply not being a 50%+ Majority) or a topic that hasn't been covered in the past by myself or someone else. That said to share one, I'm finding I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of recent Pokemon designs in the context of being monster/creature designs, even if I do like the designs themselves standalone.

The best way I can put it is that a lot of the "populous" speeches, like ones you know exist in a significant population rather than being very rare or specific entities like Legendaries, are starting to feel a bit too "distinct" if that makes any sense? Like I look at some Pokemon designs such as Incineroar, Decidueye, or Cinderace and I don't think of them as a member of a species. They feel like a singular monster that would be a Party member or an NPC in another RPG, where they at most have small distinguishing traits in case you meet other members of their race to compare (like Kimahri and the Ronso in Final Fantasy X). I think this can work to an extent with the Legendaries or Pokemon who simply don't occur frequently enough in the wild, such as Dusknoir style trade evolutions or things like the Birds/Beasts/Golems, but for the Starters or certain wild species who as a premise there must exist several of, something about that design approach doesn't quite jive in my brain.

Admittedly this is a tricky line to walk since the most I can lay this on is a vibe and maybe the level of detail in each Mon, and this isn't really objective as an issue anyway, but it's something I keep finding myself saying when I wonder why some new designs aren't clicking with me like the older ones could. This also might come from a bit of bias because I have to acknowledge that this was something some games actively employed with the Pokemon, perhaps most notably the Mystery Dungeon series, which walks an even murkier line between the Pokemon as random creatures/species and as highly individualized beings under systems that don't tend to include nicknaming for most of them
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Yes, this! Absolutely this! Inteleon and Cinderace are another pair that don't look like a plausible member of a species, they're just so humanoid.

Slightly tangential, but I think it has to do with how hard GF is going on "personality" Pokemon in recent generations. This didn't used to be so much of a thing; Togepi, for instance, is a cute fairy type but there are different Togepi out there: Misty's Togepi is friendly and curious while Dawn's Togekiss is refined and fussy, and we see another Togepi in the anime that's mean and mischievous. Gold's Togepi in the manga is a naughty delinquent.

But all Sobble are timid and cowardly, because that's a characteristic of the species. There are apparently no brave, bullish, or boisterous Sobble. I think this filters through to the design; they're designed with certain emotions or characters built in, and that makes them look less like a generic animal. Just my interpretation.
 
Don't forget the original Mon with a premade backstory and personality.
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Imagine having your backstory disproven within 1 generation due to new mechanics.
 
It seems like half of Gen 2's Pokémon only exist to look cute in the background of the anime. I swear Sentret and Stantler appear in one shot of Giratina and the Sky Warrior even though they weren't found in any Sinnoh game at the time.

Also, a lot of ArtTubers (or at least Jack from Subjectively and Truegreen7) say that personality is an important part of a Pokémon's design, so it's interesting to see people disagree. A criticism a lot of people have about Temtem is that they look "soulless", but they have a lot of life in the animated trailer, so I'm wondering if it's just because these people have only seen the idle animations.
 
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To me, a greater emphasis on fixed personalities for the starters feels like the devs think they've put themselves in a corner. They want something that's both clearly distinct from previous starters while still being mechanically simple early-game and based on a well-known animal. So they rely on a set personality/class to distinguish e.g. Rillaboom from Infernape. Personally, I'd prefer they were a little more lax with "based on a well-known animal." Bulbasaur and Mudkip are both well-loved despite not having that quality, but there hasn't been much of an attempt since.

I guess I might as well continue with the rant thinking about this drove me to. Focusing on real-world locations is actively holding the games back from having better mon and map designs. For mons, I think of the basic animals as the least interesting designs, and so think that replacing them with more alien designs would be more interesting. When making a game off a current real-world area, there's an expectation of finding similar fauna as said real area, which (at least for the fauna most people are aware of) usually has pretty noticeable overlap with the boring designs.

For a mapping example, consider the persistent problem of the Ice area being late. For it to be earlier, it needs to be nearby the starting area. The starting area needs to have a large number of towns close together because shorter routes are part of the difficulty curve. In reality, the places next to the tundra or mountaintops are less inhabited than plains and coasts the cowards. So a region that follows a real location will have the Ice area far from the starting area, inherently making it later in the game.
 
Hell Bulbasaur was popular despite several years of not deciding if it was a Dinosaur or a Frog.

I also think the simplest way to circumvent the Ice area thing described would be to implement some kind of travel point or detour in the story, like how B2W2 has you cut through the middle of Unova part way through, or Alola having chunks with the Islands; Galar was in a prime position to do this with the Wild Area and potentially open-ended progression akin to what people praise mid-game Johto for opening. That or go further with Platinum's concept and just make the region at large relatively cold/up north so that a Snow/Ice area isn't an out of the way location geographically.
 
You could also do something like the Slumbering Weald. Have an early area that's home to a legendary ice-type, where a constant blizzard makes travel impossible, but there does happen to be one patch of grass early on. The fact that it's so much colder than it should be and clearly important gives players something to look forwards to, but the grass gives them a couple odd types right away.

Or heck, just give us the ice equivalent of Mareep or whatever. There's always at least one early mon of an unusual type, make it ice this time.
 
I think a dash of personality is welcome in a design, like these bangers from Gen 1:
:gs/gengar: :gs/cubone: :gs/psyduck: :gs/snorlax: :gs/weezing: :gs/dragonair:
But doing the "job" route is when a mon stops being a creature with a default temperament and more like a person.
:ss/inteleon: :sm/tsareena: :sm/gumshoos: :ss/calyrex:
Like, having a friendly Cubone or a mean Dragonair is okay and charming in a subversive way, but having a social Inteleon or a Gumshoos with basic decency feels like they're going against they're "profession." If that makes any sense?

Cobalt Empoleon said:
GF needs to embrace the concept of ~dex filler~ more, like they used to, and trust that people will get attached to any new mon even if it doesn't have a built-in endearing personality or a weird prop it has to lug around or, like, a human job.

Dex filler mons tend to feel more like actual living creatures that fit into their ecosystems and form their own communities.
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As much as people rag on the Lumineons of the world, I think a lot of Gen 8's "simpler" mons like Pincurchin, Dubwool and Drednaw were a breath of fresh air compared to the previous gen's obsession with anthropomorphization. There ought to be a balance in the future; I'm praying Lechonk just evolves into a cool pig.

I think this can also be extended into mons having special attributes in general. Complexity bloat is real and it seems like they're introducing more unique mechanics faster than they're making them commonplace (which defeats the "GF's testing this mechanic on this one mon" argument).
Ironmage said:
For a mapping example, consider the persistent problem of the Ice area being late. For it to be earlier, it needs to be nearby the starting area. The starting area needs to have a large number of towns close together because shorter routes are part of the difficulty curve. In reality, the places next to the tundra or mountaintops are less inhabited than plains and coasts the cowards. So a region that follows a real location will have the Ice area far from the starting area, inherently making it later in the game.
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I don't get why Ice mons need to be locked to icy regions, anyway. Fire Pokemon are found all over the world. An icy mon in a cave or a deciduous forest would be reasonable.

Maybe it's because the freeze mechanics are too much for the early game?
 
Cobalt Empoleon said:
GF needs to embrace the concept of ~dex filler~ more, like they used to, and trust that people will get attached to any new mon even if it doesn't have a built-in endearing personality or a weird prop it has to lug around or, like, a human job.

Dex filler mons tend to feel more like actual living creatures that fit into their ecosystems and form their own communities.
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As long as the dex fillers actually have something going for them, otherwise people would dismiss them as generic or worse, and it happened to Pokémon like Volbeat + Illumise, Lickitung (prior or even arguably after Gen 4) Carnivine, Stonjourner, several one-stagers in Gen 2, the Surskit line, the Red and Blue forms of Basculin, Ducklett line, Seel line, the list goes on.

Not saying all dex fillers as misses, as we can see with Zangoose + Seviper, the Helioptile line, plenty of Alola’s one-stagers, and Falinks and the Snom line despite the latter’s own shortcomings. But they definitely need to be more crafty or careful with the dex fillers if they don’t want people to see too many of them as “waste of spaces”.

Galvanatic said:
Maybe it's because the freeze mechanics are too much for the early game?
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Yeah, I think that might be why GF is so hesitant to put Ice-type Pokémon in early routes in their games. But if that‘s the case, they should have revamped Freeze or strike a middle ground, makes a one-time flinch and then works like Frostbite in subsequent turns.

Complexity bloat in general is also an increasing problem, and it often ends up making Pokémon with such an unnecessary and obstructive “special” attributes that it loops back to being boring.
 
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Samtendo09 said:
As long as the dex fillers actually have something going for them, otherwise people would dismiss them as generic or worse, and it happened to Pokémon like Volbeat + Illumise, Lickitung (prior or even arguably after Gen 4) Carnivine, Stonjourner, several one-stagers in Gen 2, the Surskit line, the Red and Blue forms of Basculin, Ducklett line, Seel line, the list goes on.

Not saying all dex fillers as misses, as we can see with Zangoose + Seviper, the Helioptile line, plenty of Alola’s one-stagers, and Falinks and the Snom line despite the latter’s own shortcomings. But they definitely need to be more crafty or careful with the dex fillers if they don’t want people to see too many of them as “waste of spaces”.
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The difficulty with these types of discussions is that we all seem to be working with different definitions of 'dex filler' and to some extent we all project our own opinions of individual Pokemon onto the fanbase as a whole. Like, as far as I'm aware a lot of people really really like Seel and Dewgong, despite them being basically invisible in later gens and totally outclassed in battle, but maybe that's just me thinking 'but I like Seel!' and assuming everyone else does too.

In general though, my point was more that they shouldn't even bother putting special effort into making every dex filler mon appealing to as many people as possible. For most new Pokemon, a no-frills concept executed nicely will inevitably garner a small but devoted fanbase, even if it's forgettable to most of us and accomplishes nothing in battle. Giving everything something to make it stand out leads to the kind of messy design philosophy we have now (best exemplified imo by the massive surge in the number of abilities that can't be swapped, copied or suppressed in later gens).
 
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Honestly it's hard to say
Already by Gen 2 the overall Pokemon design philosophy drastically changed. Just look at Pidgey vs Hoothoot, or Caterpie vs Ledyba. One's a lot less cartoony than the other!
On the other hand, you had cartoony ducks/platypi like Psyduck Gen 1, vs the regal Kingdra Gen 2, so exceptions exist

Personally, I feel GF need to do multiple things for a mon;
-Figure habitat for mons. Gen 1 notably did well for this (though inner city pollution was a bit skewed in poison rep), as did Gen 3. On the other hand, 2 and 4 did very badly at bits (seriously, where can Slugma be in Johto- Magmar in Sinn-oh wait...). Environment focus can lead to less inappropriate designs for specie adaptation
-Not focus so much on personality. Cubone was a failure on that front from both a logical and moral standpoint, but it just genericfies YOUR mon to someone elses otherwise. Ambiguity helps beasts
-Realize cute can be generic. Pikaclones are the prime example of this
-hyper basic shapes shouldn't define the mon. Voltorb is laughed at nowadays for a reason
-Going to the next point, break trends of early route mons, and stop repetitive quotas. Both for habitat and type
-be aware of type diversity of your new mon dex
-move away from hyper contemporary food designs. Surprised Vanillite's reception didn't deter it
-Don't dumb down wacky creatures if used for reference. Snom generifies the Jewel Caterpillar a lot
03-SRNP-5367-DHJ73715.jpg

-Heck, give obscure plants, animals, or even mythological legends some rep. Fossil mons did a lot for that
-Don't be afriad if some designs are plainer and more realistic than others. It's impossible to have a wacky dex for over 50 designs anyway during dev crunch

Pincurchin > Snom anyway
 
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