Of all the handheld games I tribute formative memories to, Pokémon is probably at the top. One time I called Professor Birch "Professor Bitch" and my mom yelled at me. Just try and tell me that wasn't formative. I grew up with Pokemon and that's why from a place of earnest love, I think the games have a problem with how they pace themselves. Look no further than Sun and Moon. The entire first two hours of the game is tutorial, and cutscenes, and tutorial cutscenes (all unskippable even in the re-releases.) I mean there's a cutscene for jumping ledges (help) In Crystal's tutorial you walk two routes, fight your rival, learn about towns, and watch some dude catch a Pokemon. And two of those are optional so really just the first half. A generous total time of 15 minutes. Afterwards you're off on your own. I don't think I ever really felt on my own in Sun and Moon. It's so caught up in this overarching story that you lose any control you had as a player over the pacing. Pokémon became a story game first and an adventure game second. In Crystal, storytelling is environmental. The Burned Tower, Mt. Silver, Cinnabar Island. You see them when you play, but to understand them you have to search for that information. They don't make you talk to this green dude who inexplicably knows all the lore. You have to ask him yourself. It's a conscious choice. The lore is a reward for that but when you're forced to listen to lore, it's not a reward. It's a checklist. Totem Pokémon? Check. Recon squad? Check. Aether Foundation? Check. Queen and an ace? Check. You aren't exploring, you're just riding the rails of what the developer wants you to do. The storyline should be interesting enough to draw your attention to it willingly. The quest for information should be just as compelling as the quest for recognition, but half the time, Pokémon lore just falls from the ceiling! (Hey, Ron) And not only is it crammed down your throat, it's done so in a way that completely controls the rate at which you take it in. Road blocks are a constant repeating feature of Pokémon games. Do not pass go until you complete X nearby event. With this restricted progression, the collective experience becomes monotonous and subsequent playthroughs tedious. Everyone's playing the same game the same way. Pokémon often does let you travel past a town to explore ahead, but the exploration is usually superficial with maybe one or two interesting things to scout out, and always ends with you going "Alright, I get it, I'll go beat the gym first." Goldenrod city doesn't obstruct you from walking right through it into the national park but head any further and you'll learn a Sudowoodo blocks the path. There's nothing inherently wrong with this roadblock, but to pass it you have to backtrack all the way to Goldenrod to retrieve a watering can, and then walk back again. Worse yet, this can't be done without beating the Goldenrod Gym. Now to be fair this roadblock also serves as a shortcut back to the first gym making it fairly important, but the process of clearing it feels like more of a chore than it does a quest. I'm not saying roadblocks are bad, in fact roadblocks are necessary challenges, but there is a distinct difference between a logical path obstruction you have to adapt around and an obvious brick wall the developers slapped in. In my ideal world roadblocks would be disconnected from gym badges entirely, letting you come and go from towns as you wish. But instead, gyms must be done in order and only as fast as the game wants you to do them. Oftentimes reaching a town means you won't be leaving it until you've done everything available there. Even the map design reflects this. Routes are a place for exploration and progression, while towns are a place for story and preparation. Unfortunately, most replay value its throttled due to the linear nature of this. If you're trying to catch a specific Pokemon but they're only available in the second half of the game, then sorry but you're gonna have to grind your way there. This seems fairly avoidable. If wild encounters and trainers scaled their levels based off the player's badge count and then let you obtain them in any order, it would make your playthrough infinitely more personal. My ideal crystal lineup would be Typhlosion, Quagsire, Skarmory, Sneasel, Hitmontop, and Scizor. Technically Tyranitar would be here, but you don't get one until Mt. Silver, whatever. Instead of doing badges one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight, which would take me eight badges to catch this line up, the best way for me would be one eight-seven-four-five-six-three-two. I could collect my entire line up within the first four badges of the game because of their spawn locations. And yeah, new players aren't going to know their preferred lineup until they've beaten it, but they also don't have much chance to experiment outside of the norm until they're already late into it either. They'll encounter the same Pokemon in the same order as everybody else who played it. It's a franchise about making your own unique team with unique battle strategies using your own unique character. So you'd figure the game would tailor itself to a unique playthrough, but instead everybody is forced through an interchangeable experience. "Hey, bro, where you at so far?" Wouldn't it be awesome to start your playthrough by just running to some random town and pretending your family moved into the heart of the city instead of Bumfuck, Nowhere? For that matter, what if you could actually start your game from any town? Instantly the game has a new form of replay value then. If you're looking to build an ice team, then start by the snow. If you want a rock team, start by some caves. If you want a grass team, start by considering your horrible life choices. The possibilities are limitless. And speaking of limitless, I'm sure we all know this fan made image by now and I gotta say you people are insane. Nintendo is slow to adapt. They do it, but very slowly. Ignoring whether or not the Switch could even handle a game that resource-intensive, open-world Pokemon is a pipe dream for anytime soon because of how safe they play it with changing the formula. You need more evidence? I can show you with a single picture. It hurts, doesn't it? I already like how Pokemon is geographically laid out anyways - linear routes connecting towns. Keeping this design while limiting badge base progression would be a fair compromise. If the world around you scaled alongside your experience, then there wouldn't be an issue of running into the wrong place underleveled. If anything, this would let you throw in more areas like the Tin Tower or Mt. Silver. Places you reasonably cannot enter without experience because weak trainers might fucking die if they do. Finally being able to fight Red feels like an accomplishment, like you've climbed your own metaphorical mountain to get here. I don't feel that way when I'm blocked from reaching the third gym. I feel like I'm ten again and I have to wait for my mom to finish those errands before I can watch Naruto episode 124 "The Beast Within". Pokémon is supposed to feel like the opposite of that. I decide my adventure. I decide where to go. Being ten should mean nothing in this universe. If I can capture a legendary beast (full health) with a Pokéball, then I think I can handle smashing the rock that blocks you from passing the third gym. Passing roadblocks rarely feels earned. They feel more like a toll booth I have to scavenge coins up for before I can continue. Except it's actually tea, because coins made too much sense. You know what I signed up for? Exploring. Fighting. Training. And becoming the champion. You know what I didn't sign up for? This. Or this. Or th-- You want to flood the earth? YOU LIVE ON THE EARTH! A story-centric game is fine, but when it gets the way of the actual gameplay, I take issue. Often, you feel actively discouraged to explore on your own because there's implicit lore unfolding that you have to keep up with. Worse yet, this throws off the pace of gym battles, stretching hours between some of them because of how busy you become with the story. Anyways, to summarize, my ideal Pokémon game would have short form, optional tutorials, minimal mandatory story events, no mandatory badge order, and minimal badge reliant roadblocks. I can fully admit that everything I say is opinion and with opinion comes fallacy. Like, you could raise an argument that minimizing story focus would just take away from the quality of a game, and starting wherever you want on the map might just affect your ability to follow that story. Mending these problems is really just a matter of making entry points to quests more flexible, but I can acknowledge the problem. You could also raise an argument that removing badge order would be a massive undertaking given the amount of variables involved. Assuming there's eight badges we could permutate that order of completion 40,320 different ways, so scaling the difficulty through every single one of these would be hell. Maybe you could slap a multiplier onto every pokemon which grows based on your badge count, but I'm certainly in no place to call that easy. When people call Gen 2 their favorite, often times they really mean "I loved having two regions." And I understand the constraints preventing this from being a common practice. Even with reused assets, it takes a lot of development hours to implement another region, not to mention how much it might push the total file size. But multi regions aren't the only way to elongate a game's playtime. The Battle Tower and Sevii Isles were groundbreaking in themselves. Which, side note, let's go cut the Sevii Isles out, that's just fucked. I didn't even buy this game and I'm upset. Without post game Pokémon's pacing quite literally halts after the champion. Sure, you can collect Pokémon or I'm sorry, "Ultra Beasts," but is there really a reason to? I'd argue no. Battle facilities seem to be the standard Game Freak chooses, which is nice in itself, but I can't help but feel like there's a lot left to be desired with postgame content. Sun and Moon acted like they changed the formula, but they didn't. Fundamentally, nothing is different. Pokémon doesn't have to change. In fact, I'm not even saying I know how it should. But if it's going to try, I want to see a real attempt at evolution. True innovation. I want to see a new Pokémon game. Alright scripts done looks like we're good. Oh, FUCK- [Music]
I think a "this ain't my first rodeo" toggle would help with the pacing. It could just shut off a lot of those long running tutorial things that bog the game down.
Like a lot of us have been playing these games forever, unless catching pokemon has completely changed we can figure it out in this one lol
That way the youngsters can get the tutorials that help them out, while the grizzled Pokemon vets can skip passed a lot of it.
The observation that Pokémon became story game first, adventure game second and that the series used to be with letting you miss stuff but now railroads you through most of the content is pretty spot on, because it is exactly what the developers have said about their new design philosophy. They believe people don't have the attention span to deal with the old way anymore, so they don't let you miss stuff, they over-tutorialise and to justify this increase in railroading they add more story.
As much as the Sudowoodo roadblock could have been more elegant (Pokémon has always sucked at natural feeling roadblocks) it is actually an really important roadblock, not because it stops you progressing, but because the developer believes players who don't yet have the Squirtbottle aren't inquisitive enough to get the most of of the rest of the game. As the video stats GSC is a game that will happily let you miss cool and important stuff if you don't engage with it and the Sudowoodo is GameFreaks clunky but likely necessary way of telling kids playing this game that if you don't look around you're going to miss shit, that this game rewards searching every nook an cranny.
I'm not sure how I feel about putting the whole National Park between Sudowoodo and the Squirtbottle, but I think putting it after Goldenrod was very intentional, it was to get you to explore the key city of the game and discover the important locations in Goldenrod. But after that the game did in fact let go your hand which is what the newer games are in desperate need of.
I think the video puts way too much emphasis on how things effect replay value and not enough on just making a game good for a first time player, but I think he's spot on about how drip feeding Pokémon species to the player in a largely linear fashion is a really bad design choice. You end up with so many people having almost identical parties because the Pokémon they want to use doesn't come until so late on that they're already invested into someone else. Even when I replay I often up end up pushing through with just a couple Pokémon waiting until a Pokémon that takes my fancy shows up because I don't want to use Geodude for the 20th time.
Gonna have to disagree here. Entering Kanto was hype, but after that it was pretty clear just a boss rush that didn't take very long. I think what was so special about Gen 2 was that it had so much stuff to discover that you could totally gloss over. People talk about pacing issues in GSC, but I think a lot of it is when you replay you tend not to take things slow and enjoy all the side content like you would on a first playthrough which means you probably hit the Elite 4 pretty underleveled. But treat GSC as more of a traditional JRPG instead of a modern Pokémon game and I think that's where it starts to shine, just going back to it now the tendency is not to play it that way which I think is a big part of why many aren't a big fan of it anymore.
Only reason Gamefreak never changes the Pokemon formula, is unlike other super popular games, Pokemon has quite literally no competition, so there is never any incentive for them to change anything. They know people will keep buying their games.
I feel like a lot of Nintendo games have fallen into a trend of focusing on Saturday-morning, C-grade anime stories. Pokemon is no exception. I think this video hits the nail on the head: the adventure is the most important part.
Pokémon has never been about the story to me. Gens 1 and 2 you’re just a kid who’s out to be the very best and catch em all. Along the way you take down a crime syndicate but for me the stories were always the ones you made on your own. The legendaries were a bonus and with the exception of crystal, the lore was an extra bonus (as mentioned in the video). Remember reading about Mew and Mewtwo in the mansion? Then remember finally seeing Mewtwo at the end of a huge labyrinth? It was epic and didn’t need cutscenes or hours of expository dialogue.
Now, the legendaries are all part of this main quest where you’re the chosen one and beating everything is your destiny or whatever. The quest is just a bad JRPG told with Pokémon and Ultrabeasts (still confused just what those are) mechanics.
That’s why HGSS will never be the definitive editions of GSC to me. The Kimono girls stalk you because you’re meant to save the world or something ridiculous like that. If I save the world I feel like the champion. It totally takes out the crazy journey of battling the Pokémon league and Red.
Also, I get that you need to cater to kids but guess what? Kids probably aren’t reading the awful dialogue that goes on for 10 minutes. Give them a “Smell ya later” and they’ll laugh their asses off.
I tend to agree with the issues pointed out in this video. The Pokemon franchise has largely stayed the same for 7 "generations" of games. Sun and Moon seemed like they were changing it up, so I tried to jump back in, but I couldn't stick with it due to many of the reasons he pointed out.
I know the likelihood of Gamefreak truly innovating is low, especially with what we have seen so far of Sword and Shield (why are random encounters still a thing?), but I still long and hope for the day the franchise actually takes a risk in order to improve a 20+ year old formula.
The problem with all of these changes is that they're great changes for an adult demographic, and adults (I assume) will never be the target demographic that Nintendo is going for. Adults who buy the game because of nostalgia will buy the game anyways regardless of whether or not it completely flips the script.
For kids who aren't experienced gamers, these changes would largely go unnoticed. As a kid, most RPG games had a largely linear story progression (with a few shining examples). Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, and Pokemon were my absolute favourites as a child. I was enthralled by the idea of an adventure, I wasn't ever concerned with whether or not other people playing had the same experience as me, I was just enjoying this new world that was presented to me. I didn't realize that roadblocks in these games were deliberate ways of blocking progression because allowing for open ended progression was too complicated, I just saw them as obstacles to be overcome as part of the games world.
A new gamer isn't going to have the same cynicism about these kinds of game mechanics as someone who has been playing games for 20 years. When a new gamer comes across a sudowoodo that blocks their path, their thinking isn't going to be "Why did the developers put a sudowoodo there?"
Saying "I didn't sign up for this" doesn't hold a lot of weight when the games have always been that and, by now, you definitely did sign up for this. You'd like it to change, but there hasn't been a game so far where you weren't limited. That's what this whole series is.
I'd love for them to suddenly become much more competent and re imagine pokemon like BotW re-imagined Zelda, but while Nintendo is willing to embrace change, GameFreak has never really been that adventurous. I think they're the bottleneck in pokemon's progress.
I'm not saying I disagree with him, but I find that a lot of these types of videos devolve into "that's not what X is about!" or "I didn't buy X to do this".
The game is what the developers say it is.