Topic: What Kind of Story Should a Pokemon Game Have?

I could easily create a darker story for pokemon in like a minute but it'd be too dark for pokemon.

I wish the rival would return to being a total jerk like the first few gens. It makes it more satisfying when you destroy their teams. >:3
Also he/she could be like Silver in gen 2 and have actual character development.

that red haired boy who stole one of Prof.Elm's Pokémon? yup I'd feel much better beating the heck out of the rival if it wasn't just an annoying friend that challenges the player only in the most inconvenient times.

I was pretty okay with X/Y's story even if is wasn't groundbreaking. For the next game, I wouldn't mind a deeper story that actually explores it's themes in depth. Doesn't have to be dark, I actually wouldn't mind a theme that focused on one type of "light" vs. the other (i.e. artificial, "perfect" goodness vs. natural, imperfect goodness). The extra companions could have been a lot more useful and the Champion + gym leaders with bigger roles so you can care about them more once you faced them in battle. Clement and his sister I would definitely have liked to have seen a lot more of in the game since the anime sealed them as my favorites.

That wasn't what I was referring to.

I think the Pokemon games are best when the stories are implicit, rather than being plot based. The main character shouldn't have a huge amount of personality but he should be driven by the desire to be the best there ever was. The people he meets are just getting by in the world inhabited by Pokemon. Also, I would prefer if the rival wasn't a jerk but instead was just an ambitious kid like you - it's so much more satisfying to beat someone in a fair battle since it feels like you worked hard towards it.

Also, the best part of the story would be exploration and the sense of adventure from travelling between towns. The residents of a big city should speak differently and have different outlooks on life compared to the small country village, for example. Little touches like that will make the game feel more rewarding.

With children as the target audience and PETA waiting for any wrong move it would be difficult for gamefreak to make a complex/slightly darker/deep plot that would satisfy me xD If PMD Explorers of Time/darkness/sky got me hooked up. then I'm pretty sure another game with a great storyline such as that would be made . X and Y had something going but it lacked character involvement...there were plenty of characters...especially the gym leaders but most of them had little to no involvement in the main story. and PMD gates to infinity almost got me but some cheesiness in certain scenes broke it...well that's just me Im pretty sure others viewed the recent games more positively than mine.

Actually the story's one thing that always held me back from really getting into a Pokémon game.
That young teenage "i want to be the best in a game" just doesn't interest me. Something darker might be for me.

Totally agree. The rivals from Gen 3 all the way to X and Y were too nice. A rival like Silver or Blue/Green (Who steals the Eevee from Oak in Pokemon Yellow) could totally do some justice to the Rival part of the game.

I always thought that too - I'd imagined that I would grow out of Pokemon (and in a way I have, since I haven't played a main series game since Gen IV) but now I can see that the series appeal lies in the fact that we were all idealistic children at one point. I think it's lovely that Satoshi Tajiri reminisced about how when he was a child the world around him was a big adventure and the bugs and tadpoles were creatures to discover. The Pokemon world aims to conjure up that same sense of childish discovery no matter how old the player is, which is why I'd rather the series not stray into darker territory.

@Jollykarp Thanks for sharing that. I guess it's more that i can't relate to the creatures in any way really. Maybe that's why i find these battles pointless and am not motivated to get deeper into the series. I just think that if from the beginning on there was another reason for them to fight like an evil thread it may have more of an appeal to me.

I don't think the problem is the story but rather the dialogue of the characters, it's always bland and cliche. That would go a long way for me to actually care about the characters rather than a having backstory, plot and motives etc.

Not technically story related, and I'm not sure if such an idea has been done before (I've only started playing Pokemon when X/Y came out), but what if the theme was cyberspace or at least an area with that concept? And there would be many more manmade Pokemon like Porygon (MissingNo?) and the story could be a cautionary tale of technology and how we could possibly go too far with it.

Though now that I've said that it'd sound too much like Digimon...

How about an evil Team that hates Pokemon? Maybe they think that dependence on Pokemon has made people weaker and more naiive, and instead of using Pokemon against you, they have robots or something. Their goal would be to wipe out all of the Pokemon in the world and force the human race to stand on it's own.

Perhaps instead of eight gym leaders in a region, you'd be able to go between regions and fight gym leaders from all over. Provided you have eight or more badges, you'd be allowed to face the elite four. For that matter, the Gym leaders would have their own agenda against the new Team X, and you might find them in groups working together to take them down. Perhaps your Pokemon may be severely under-powered for one leader, and you'd have to come back later in order to fight the other one.

If Gamefreak made Pokemon games that were subtlety dark, with little hints here and there of terrible things (kind of like how it was hinted that Cubone's mother was killed by team rocket) would you still play them?

A good example of this would be Majora's Mask, where they don't outright talk about death, but you can pretty much draw the conclusions yourself without much thought.

@Blast I totally forgot to tell you I put the thread up, sorry. XD

I call upon you from unheard realms...

@mamp I'd like to hear it.