Feb 26, 2015, 02:53 PM
Now that I've recently played through XY and ORAS (my first since R/B), I feel I can point a couple things out.
Skarric really hit the nail on the head here, but there's one more massive problem to take into account. The speed bump gym leaders, non-existent rivals, and throwaway villains are made even worse by the fact that you're the savior of the entire universe before you even have all the badges. That alone makes the elite four and champion completely irrelevant. The games tell you your journey is about to begin, but if they were honest, they'd say your parade is about to begin. For no reason whatsoever, you're a cult of personality very early on (you'd think nobody has ever beaten a single gym before) and everybody depends on you even though you've never actually proven you're the best at anything. You have people showering you with gifts right from the start, and even the champion in ORAS is practically worshiping you through the whole game. It's Pokemon...saving the world should probably not even be part of the equation.
Nor should breeding. Pokemon should only be about 3 things: catching, training, and fighting. The biggest reason I quit Pokemon after gen 1 was breeding. I thought it was completely idiotic the instant I heard about it, and I definitely feel that way after experiencing it and immediately seeing all the problems it creates. Back in the early days, I don't remember anybody having the slightest notion about how to actually max stats (it wasn't mentioned at all in the Prima guide, and I never saw it mentioned on any website of the day), but "legitimately raised" was real, because you could look at a Pokemon raised from the lowest level possible with vitamins and plainly see the difference between it and one that was caught in the unknown dungeon (high starting level) or one that was rare candied to 100. The perception was that if you went the easy route in your training, your Pokemon sucked, and you got made fun of if you actually tried to use them against other people.
And that's the way it should still be. Your Pokemon should reflect your training, not your breeding. Or maybe in the anime they should show Ash taking sack fulls of baby Pokemon out to the river to drown them because their IVs, ability, or nature aren't exactly perfect and never can be regardless of how amazing he might be as a trainer.
Consequently, genders have always been a problem as well. In the original games they had some very obvious single gender Pokemon designs, and you could maybe give them a pass since they didn't take breeding into account back then, but honestly, things have not changed a bit. To this day they still design Pokemon as if they're clearly male or female inspired. 87.5% male Braixen is obviously designed with fur in the shape of a dress. Even its English name incorporates the word Vixen, which means a female fox. Breeding is so irrelevant to what Pokemon is, that the actual Pokemon designs don't even take it into account except for silly little things like occasionally adding a heart shape somewhere to distinguish a female from a male. It certainly serves no purpose within the actual game itself. There's a daycare where the breeding happens (I don't remember any of that stuff going on when I was in daycare...is this Pokemon or Brave New World?) and that's about as far as the game actually cares about breeding.
By getting rid of breeding, you also take a giant step towards solving the pentagon problem. People will always cheat, but you can virtually guarantee it doesn't ruin your ability to fully enjoy the game or leave you at a severe disadvantage competitively (especially if you're a new/returning player like me). All you have to do is make a special NPC that takes any non-pentagon and then awards it a pentagon after resetting all of its info to minimum/basic value (including basic pokeball). Then you're free to raise it legitimately, and you don't have to worry about not having any of that stuff, because it's all trainable in the game. There's even an NPC that can transfer any of your mons to another ball as long as the ball is obtainable in the game (and you provide the ball yourself...the original ball would be lost, so no taking something out of an event ball to use the ball on something else). So easy a caveman could do it, and it solves so many problems that you'd have to write a book just to explain every little nuance.
Another point about the importance of emphasizing the training aspect of Pokemon is that it makes it easier to balance the roster. It doesn't even seem like they try very hard to narrow the gap between ubers and total joke Pokemon, but that should be the appeal of training. Just because they're initially weak doesn't mean they should always be limited to sucking. Magikarp is the classic example. The idea was that if you take this worthless fish and put the effort in to train it, you were rewarded with one of the best/coolest Pokemon in the game. There needs to be a ton more of that, but stuff like Mega Evolution is the exact opposite of progress.
(Jan 23, 2015, 06:22 PM)Skarric Wrote: Memorable characters.
Skarric really hit the nail on the head here, but there's one more massive problem to take into account. The speed bump gym leaders, non-existent rivals, and throwaway villains are made even worse by the fact that you're the savior of the entire universe before you even have all the badges. That alone makes the elite four and champion completely irrelevant. The games tell you your journey is about to begin, but if they were honest, they'd say your parade is about to begin. For no reason whatsoever, you're a cult of personality very early on (you'd think nobody has ever beaten a single gym before) and everybody depends on you even though you've never actually proven you're the best at anything. You have people showering you with gifts right from the start, and even the champion in ORAS is practically worshiping you through the whole game. It's Pokemon...saving the world should probably not even be part of the equation.
Nor should breeding. Pokemon should only be about 3 things: catching, training, and fighting. The biggest reason I quit Pokemon after gen 1 was breeding. I thought it was completely idiotic the instant I heard about it, and I definitely feel that way after experiencing it and immediately seeing all the problems it creates. Back in the early days, I don't remember anybody having the slightest notion about how to actually max stats (it wasn't mentioned at all in the Prima guide, and I never saw it mentioned on any website of the day), but "legitimately raised" was real, because you could look at a Pokemon raised from the lowest level possible with vitamins and plainly see the difference between it and one that was caught in the unknown dungeon (high starting level) or one that was rare candied to 100. The perception was that if you went the easy route in your training, your Pokemon sucked, and you got made fun of if you actually tried to use them against other people.
And that's the way it should still be. Your Pokemon should reflect your training, not your breeding. Or maybe in the anime they should show Ash taking sack fulls of baby Pokemon out to the river to drown them because their IVs, ability, or nature aren't exactly perfect and never can be regardless of how amazing he might be as a trainer.
Consequently, genders have always been a problem as well. In the original games they had some very obvious single gender Pokemon designs, and you could maybe give them a pass since they didn't take breeding into account back then, but honestly, things have not changed a bit. To this day they still design Pokemon as if they're clearly male or female inspired. 87.5% male Braixen is obviously designed with fur in the shape of a dress. Even its English name incorporates the word Vixen, which means a female fox. Breeding is so irrelevant to what Pokemon is, that the actual Pokemon designs don't even take it into account except for silly little things like occasionally adding a heart shape somewhere to distinguish a female from a male. It certainly serves no purpose within the actual game itself. There's a daycare where the breeding happens (I don't remember any of that stuff going on when I was in daycare...is this Pokemon or Brave New World?) and that's about as far as the game actually cares about breeding.
By getting rid of breeding, you also take a giant step towards solving the pentagon problem. People will always cheat, but you can virtually guarantee it doesn't ruin your ability to fully enjoy the game or leave you at a severe disadvantage competitively (especially if you're a new/returning player like me). All you have to do is make a special NPC that takes any non-pentagon and then awards it a pentagon after resetting all of its info to minimum/basic value (including basic pokeball). Then you're free to raise it legitimately, and you don't have to worry about not having any of that stuff, because it's all trainable in the game. There's even an NPC that can transfer any of your mons to another ball as long as the ball is obtainable in the game (and you provide the ball yourself...the original ball would be lost, so no taking something out of an event ball to use the ball on something else). So easy a caveman could do it, and it solves so many problems that you'd have to write a book just to explain every little nuance.
Another point about the importance of emphasizing the training aspect of Pokemon is that it makes it easier to balance the roster. It doesn't even seem like they try very hard to narrow the gap between ubers and total joke Pokemon, but that should be the appeal of training. Just because they're initially weak doesn't mean they should always be limited to sucking. Magikarp is the classic example. The idea was that if you take this worthless fish and put the effort in to train it, you were rewarded with one of the best/coolest Pokemon in the game. There needs to be a ton more of that, but stuff like Mega Evolution is the exact opposite of progress.
