Topic: Pokemon Z

And people claim that Smash's competitive community is toxic and elitist

Atleast in smash there is no "enforced" ruleset by the community... smogon kids themselves by making their rules more offical than global link's own rules.

I wonder if Game Freak will take Sakurai's advice and nerf Greninja in Z.

@MegaBeedrill: Eh, most people tend to follow the same ruleset in Smash as far as tournaments go, especially for Melee. Even then there's still going to be differences as you get to choose one of the stages to be banned for that set. For Smash 4 there's still ruleset differences that are being made since the meta is still in its infancy, plus there's still debate on customs.

The beauty with Pokemon's competitive community is you can get away with varying rulesets as you can adapt easily so long as it's still the same format. VGC is technically the official ruleset for Doubles, yet TPC doesn't enforce it at all and has made it clear that you don't have to follow that ruleset outside of the official VGC tournament. Singles doesn't really have an official ruleset, since the Global Link changes the ruleset a bit for every Ranked season.

Smogon's not an official ruleset at all, so it baffles me that so many people treat it as such.

@Grumblevolcano: Ha. Probably not though. There's probably going to be a Mega Greninja, regardless of how broken it is. The "Ash Greninja" that's in the new CoroCoro scans I think is just a special Greninja that's basically this generation's Spiky-Eared Pichu.

Spiky Eared Greninja?

Can we all agree at least that Lysandre shouldn't be the main villain in Pokemon Z? I want Giovanni to come back. Heck, Cyrus from Platinum should come back. And I want a time skip because we can see the friends in Pokemon X/Y grow up and Kalos grow.

Ha. So according to the new formes page on Serebii, Zygarde Core (the blob) acts as the brain for Zygarde's complete formes (10%, 50%, Perfect). When Zygarde Core fuses with multiple Zygarde Cell, it becomes one of Zygarde's complete formes, presumably Zygarde 10% Forme. From there it can become Zygarde 50% Forme somehow. When Zygarde 50% Forme struggles in battle, it is said to unleash its power to become Zygarde Perfect Forme, which has power that exceeds that of Xerneas and Yveltal.

What's not clear is how going from Zygarde Core and Zygarde Cell to Zygarde 10% Forme or Zygarde 50% Forme works. Can you go from Zygarde Core and Zygarde Cell straight to Zygarde 50% Forme, or do you have to go through 10% Forme first? Perhaps you can fuse Core and x number of Cell to make 10% Forme, or y number of Cell to make 50% Forme. Or perhaps you fuse Zygarde Core and x number of Zygarde Cell to form Zygarde 10% Forme, and then from there you can have 10% Forme become 50% Forme by raising its power level (fusing 10% Forme with more Zygarde Cell).

So the tl;dr version is basically "this isn't even my final form!". Yeah, we definitely Dragon Ball Z now.

Great idea, I hope Z adds more locations (bigger Lumiose City for example). I think Lysandre should have more character development, as Cyrus coming back doesn't really make sense and the fans won't really be happy.

@MegaBeedrill LOL no, ORAS wasn't superior to Platinum in any way and neither will Z without some major restructuring to the game that they would never resort to doing in a third version. Nothing will ever surpass Platinum as long as they keep making linear regions, trainer rosters short and easy, and the content keeps declining.

@Bolt_Strike: Platinum is more linear than DP, and is actually fairly linear in general once you remove the large amount of backtracking.

Still better than Unova and Kalos by a long shot.

All I read was "platinum being better is a fact because I said so regardless of how few people agree with me."

Platinum did a lot more to improve the experience of DP than ORAS did to improve R/S. Heck, they didn't even bother to add more water Pokemon beyond Wingull and Tentacool! ORAS was pure lazy. Platinum sped up the battles, greatly improved the diversity of the pokedex, added a bunch of post game content, and more stuff I can't remember since it's been years.

@DarthNocturnal Lysandre's plans were more castostrophic, however I feel in the end, his goals were very unexplained or flawed. His goal, by quote, was "to make the world more beautiful" and so, by doing that he plans on killing everything that breaths including pokemon themselves with the ultimate weapon. It was more of a flawed terroristic threat than a diabolical plan like say, cyrus who wants to basically control the entire universe and in progress, could cause as much castostrophic damage.

On the note of platinum, yes it did a lot further to DP, but it's honestly overexaderated how much it did when there weren't necessarly any new areas (you had distortion world which can only be visited once and gets a very small area the second visit), no new mechanic updates, pretty much everything was the same and highly ignorable except for the battle frontier (never bothered with it) and the new rotom, giratina, and shaymin forms. The story was good, but story last only a playthrough, once you're done, pretty much that's it.. you continue your goal to catch em all or competitive battle. Gen 4 had a generally good landscape and setting for platinum to build off of, and platinum obviously did add rather than subtract.

ORAS was great in that it contained all the up to date content within it's generation (two gens worth of changes and pokemon), additional features like dexnav, soaring (meh), new forms (Primals and megas), a patched up storyline (not so much for RS, but generally X/Y's mega evolution theory), and still rememberable locations.

The first flaw with oras, was the metagame, the most time consuming part of a player's post game experience, which is battling online, was absolutely disgusting. The PSS is filled with the previously mentioned smogonites which are more prevelant now than ever, and if it ain't smogonites, it's a kid using mega rayquaza or primal groudon.. not to mention GF completely unbalanced the game with the addition of mons in gen 6 such as talonflame, fairies, mega salamence, etc. This makes the competitive battle somewhat stale and boring today in that it's easier to simply bring the same 3 mons on every team and click the win button on most of them...

The second flaw was the lack of interesting events, I've mentioned how heatran had a cool stark mountain event, regigigas had an interesting collectaton reggies event and a cool puzzle area to go through, giratina had turnback cave, even rotom which isn't a legend had a specifically timed TV encounter.. in BW even volcarona, not really that special, had an egg event and a turnback cave like puzzle event. In ORAS, there are NO events.. the reggies we got, however the reggies have been nothing new since gen 3, deoxys and rayquaza are forced on you, and every other legendary is as simple as entering a portal.

Otherwise ORAS did a great job. It actually added additional replay value in dexnav, and added additional toys in new megas to experiment with. Just the competitive metagame is crap. Battle Frontier was a slap in the face too, but after the first week of the game we'd forget about that.

I think the issue was that ORAS was a remake while platinum was a 3 version type thing. And I liked the delta episode more then the battle frontier.

But Platinum didn't need new areas or mechanic updates, it was fine in those areas as is. DP's only big flaw was the shallow dex variety, which Platinum fixed. It also improved in storyline and optional content. So Platinum had a good story, good region design, good dex variety, and a wealth of content. It's practically a flawless game.

I can think of several more flaws from the originals that ORAS never touched. They did almost nothing to address Hoenn's lack of variety, only adding in a handful of cross gen evolutions. It did very little to make the water routes less of a pain to explore, the new graphic engine made the areas feel smaller making it easier to tell where to go but they're still too open ended and confusing. And Hoenn was lacking a good post game section and didn't really get one, instead it got a handful of tiny islands that take all of 2 seconds to explore. In fact, not only was Hoenn's post game not improved, it actually got worse in ORAS with them removing everything from Emerald. So no, it wasn't a great remake, it was mediocre.

I don't find any "it lacked emerald content" viable criticism towards ORAS since it's called Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire not Delta Emerald. The pokedex expansion was an issue that was never fixed, I'll give you that (but mostly because I hate any pokedex with a large portion of past gen mons), however the water routes problem was indeed solved with the new soaring mechanic. In which players can basically go to any route they want including midway on these water routes.

"ORAS didn't really get a good post game section" I would hardly say since the delta episode was actually a story driven post game unlike most pokemon games, in which the post game is simply just solving legendary events and puzzles where eventually the moment passes (which oras did lack in general, no moments with the legends at all, and two legends were kinda forced on you.)

What defines a pokemon game's quality more is the replay value, pokemon is a franchise meant to be revisited over and over again, and the game is meant to have over plenty of things to do even after everything is completed. ORAS fixed this issue in the offline perspective, giving shiny hunters and competitive breeders plenty of things to do and experiment with.. such as dexnav, new mega sets, and other meaningful things that player could still do ten years from now. Whereas before back then, it was pretty much as long as you had wifi, you'd keep going back just for the online or repetitively playing the E4/Battle Frontier.

ORAS > Platinum in terms of up to date content and replay value
Platinum > ORAS in terms of remember able characters, story, and generally better legendary encounters.

@DarthNocturnal: I'm sorry but Lysandre was garbage. Horrible. Written horribly. Whoever wrote the story for Pokemon War, AZ, and Lysandre should get slapped. And that's like the really bittersweet thing about Kalos: soooo much potential yet failed execution in story. And Kalos has even more problems but story is the real big one.

Who honestly remembers what team flare was fighting for?