insert image of the materialisation of the concept of competition ass fucking and cumming inside the equally gay and nerdier materialisation of the concept of innovation
It absolutely was for a week. There is no content beyond breeding pals and the second you Google anything the game is boring. No story, no interesting fights, everything is level based and the second you are within 5 levels of something you can kill it.
That’s the thing, it doesn’t matter if your game has world class graphics, diversity, originality, innovation, or is made by a great team of people, all that matters is that playing it IS FUN. Seems all these studios are forgetting that part.
Normal gameplay is fun if it wasn’t it wouldn’t sell 20M copies every release. People like to dunk on pokemon and there are many reasons to but they are still fun to play for millions of people.
Exactly this. I havent played a pokemon game in 10+ years because theyre ALL the same. I played palworld start to finish and loved every second of it, in my head its the pokemon game we deserved and what fans have been wanting for DECADES. Its just sad that it took an indie company to do it instead of nintendo with its billions.
After nintendo sued them for copying the 'throwing a ball to capture monsters', i said im out, cant support that company any more.
The only issue is that it has basically no artistic merit and is basically a tech demo that exists purely to say 'look at what you could have done with your IP' instead of doing anything interesting. It has no identity other than 'pokemon clone with guns' in the public mind and frankly, the worst mainline pokemon games absolutely style on it in terms of tone, writing, and consistency.
Shit on nintendo all you want, but if you choose to uplift the brain rot, don't be surprised when everything falls to shit.
It’s not even a ripoff of pokemon. It’s ark with creatures where a lot of them are very similar to pokemon. People keep saying it’s pokemon with guns but it’s not even close.
Thats a fault of where it's positioned in the market and the deliberate aesthetic overlap.Â
People who are capital G gamers and 'in' on the scene know that. But the average consumer doesn't. Thats not how the public consciousness works. You can try to deny it but you throw balls and cute, furry fuckers with elemental affinity. If you say that and think of anything but Pokemon, the largest and most valuable franchise on earth, you're cracked.
to be fair, they have introduced new stuff, the problem is all the new stuff is worse than the old stuff lol. Pixel-era Pokemon was still the best, everything after has been a bit weird and ultra gimmicky.
Black and White 2 just feels like literal perfection having a beloved style, story and there is so much content to do. I wish they would make a proper pixel game again, but that's a fever dream.
I'm personally very fond of ORAS though lmao. I played Black first, but it's the main pokemon game I spent several times more than the others at about ~500 hours. I actually loved Scarlet's gaameplay but I only sunk 120~ and that's several times more than the usual of 30 or so like Shield 💀
I do recommend the DSI XL for the sprite pokemon games lol. It's the perfect ratio + a vibrant dual IPS. They're pretty cozy to hold too compared to my floppy 3DS LL. (N3DSes did fix that though.)
True, today‘s content in games is 50% slapping PBR materials and reflections on everything so the graphics will help sell it. Sometimes I believe having to be clever with your resources on limited hardware also made people to come up with interesting mechanics and ideas. Many mechanics today are more like good coding practices but from a players perspective more like who asked for this to begin with? Eastern devs still mostly get it but western studios somehow forgot this ancient knowledge over the last 10 years. Just go back and play any rpg from 15 years ago and you can spot and feel the difference in like 15 minutes and see why they are shutting down one after another. It’s the same reason why anime pretty much replaced all tv shows for my generation and the ones afterwards. I can’t name a single tv show that runs in western tv channels.
There was a plot line where you have to fight a Hypno over a child but I think Hypno was protecting the kid and you were just meant to think it was a kidnapping.
There is a Drowzie who kidnaps a child in the pokemon mystery dungeon games though
Black and White 2 just feels like literal perfection having a beloved style, story and there is so much content to do. I wish they would make a proper pixel game again, but that's a fever dream.
I'm personally very fond of ORAS though lmao. I played Black first, but it's the main pokemon game I spent several times more than the others at about ~500 hours. I actually loved Scarlet's gaameplay but I only shit.
I genuinely think teras is mechanically the best system they've created post gen 4. However, conceptually mega evolutions were my favorite.
The problem with megas was that competitively it was terrible and pokemon traditionally does not update fast enough to fix the limited pool of viable pokemon.
This is the game where Landorous terrorized competitive for like 3 gens straight and is still meta.
I'll say this everywhere and anywhere -- If anyone is looking for a better version of a pokemon-style game, play Monster Sanctuary! It is a platform jumper and turn-based monster catching game that involves a whole lot more strategy and team compositions than pokemon!
What I love about Monster Sanctuary is the skill trees involved with each monster, which allows you to play each monster in different ways, AND the order in which moves you use really comes into effect! It is a super fun and strategic-minded game! So much better than pokemon IMO. And its cheap! I bought it on sale for $4.99 a few weeks ago and can't stop playing!
and it’s just not enough time to polish the games as well as they did 15+ years ago.
The games were never polished because GameFreak's dev. team kind of bites. It took Iwata coming in to actually fix the damn things for them to even function.
Nintendo had similar issues in the 80s and early 90s and also relied on HAL's staff--who actually knew what they were doing--to clean up the unworkable software they churned out. GameFreak just never really evolved the way Nintendo's in-house dev teams have.
Which looks like a problem to me since they make billions selling their games. How much more successful could they be if they committed more resources to making games?
Pokemon is the highest grossing franchise in history. They could lose billions of euros on the games every year and still profit from it. They can hire an army of programmers, game designers and artist, pay them three times the asked wages an let them loose on making games for years, all on the proceeds of one plushy line.
It's folk wisdom that you can't buy yourself into being a great artist. Welp, the wise folk have never seen the Pokemon company. Because it can literally do that, at major loss, without breaking a sweat.
The shit games they make now are a choice. Not a product of circumstance. Not a "on shucks, can't be helped". They choose to make terrible games.
They wouldn't be. Generation 5 was the highest quality generation with a lot of innovations, new mechanics and the most fleshed out post game and side content the series has ever had and sold the worst in the series. Then right after that x and y shipped half finished and was the best selling game in the series other than the original red and blue.
Pokemon sells because of brand recognition and advertising, not because the games are good and TPC knows this and it's why the games have been consistently bad since then. Nintendo cares about their image and would never release a game in the state X and Y and sword and shield and scarlet and violet were in but since game freak is a 2nd party studio and it still sells they don't give a shit
Nintendo doesn’t make pokemon and game freaks dev team for mainline games is actually surprisingly small. Not defending them just saying they even put the poke dollars so they’re making money from all ends not just games
Nah, indie teams tend to put a lot of effort and heart into their games (not always, I'm aware). Recent pokemon releases look exactly how I'd expect a company resting on their laurels and just cashing in on brand recognition with minimal effort to look.
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u/Lord_Viktoo 22h ago
Well, look at how Pokemon looks, and you could be fooled. :P