Topic: Pokémon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl

That worked in Let's Go, but mostly because you always had your partner pokemon attached to you, even when it's not in the current party.

Here, it would still make you have to carry specific pokemon that can learn the moves in your team, so it would be not much different from how the HMs worked in the past. Some of the moves were useful in battle as well.

I've always thought that giving you the option to unlearn the HM moves would work just fine. They just need to make sure you can't release your last pokemon that can learn an specific HM move. However, the gen 7 approach seems more convenient.

@Eel That's true.. I honestly don't know how they'd handle HM's. I thought of something like maybe the trainer carries around actual items that replace them, but at the same time I doubt they'd go for that as they like pushing the relationship between humans and their pokemon.

Perhaps they could just give you something like the poke ride pager that simply allows you to call/assign your own pokemon to do the actions, even if they're in the PC.

That could be cute.

I guess that could work.

@VoidofLight yes, they'll have to tinker with the level design, for sure. Mt. Coronet was basically shielded off by HM's. I just remember every team on my playtrough only having 5 Pokémons because I had to take Bibarel along for the ride. I thought gen 7 fixed the HM issue in a genuinely fun way.

If gen 7 hadn't been so hand-holdy and full of cut scenes, it would have been one of the better games of the franchise, now that I think of it. There went a lot of care in those games, they kinda blow SWSH out of the water. But this is off topic.

@Suicune The reason I can't see them redoing the level design, is mainly because they're trying to preserve it. That's why I think that either HM's will come back, or get replaced by something else. (Not to mention, the games kind of suffered level design wise due to HM's being removed, with Sword and Shield showcasing that first and foremost.)

Yeah, removing the core mechanics behind HMs and modifying the game world would be like removing a large part of Diamond and Pearl's identity. Sinnoh is like a big puzzle in these games, and HMs open it up as we progress.

The field actions themselves can be streamlined and improved, instead of using the traditional HM system as it was in the original games, but I feel they're important to the game as a whole.

@Eel That's honestly a thing I miss. How regions used to be huge puzzles that you had to figure out how to traverse. Now they're just sort of hallways that take you from one town to the next.

I wouldn't mind HMs so much if they were incorporated into the player's overworld mobility by default rather than having to prompt HMs every damn time. Ideally, what should happen is that the player will climb up a rock by default when interacting with (or simply walking into) a scalable rock when one has a Pokémon that knows Rock Climb in their party (and possesses the requisite badges) or immediately jumping in to the water when walking in to it with a Pokémon that knows Surf, rather than initiating text box after bloody text box.

We'd still be losing a few move slots (and many may still opt for a "HM slave" or two), but the utilisation of HMs in the overworld would be FAR less irritating.

@Eel I think the reason they don't allow you to easily overwrite HMs is simply because there are too many edge cases. I'm not sure if this is a thing that can happen but the first thing that immediately came to my mind was that you could be in a cave, replace Strength with a TM, evolve that Pokémon and the evolution can't learn Strength. You're stuck.

It's entirely possible that they've already taken this into account beforehand and there are no evolution lines where this could happen. And they could always just rework movesets like they already do between games.

There are already some crazy ways to get yourself softlocked in older games if you try hard enough because of things they didn't take into account with HMs so they probably just want to play it safe. What they should do is at least have a move deleter in every town. That would already make things much better.

Unless you release every pokemon that can learn an specific HM, then there's really not many ways to get stuck, if any at all. So that's all they'd have to do:

1) Can this pokemon learn HM X?
->If no, release/trade it
->If yes, then move to question 2

2) Are there other pokemon that can learn HM X in the PC or party?
->If no, stop the releasing/trading process
->If yes, release/trade it

I don't think there's any pokemon that lose the ability to learn an specific HM after they evolve, either. I'd need to check that though.

Getting stuck in a cave is not really possible either. It's mostly just Surf and Fly the ones that can make you permanently stuck in older games.

As a fun fact, the original Diamond and Pearl do have a way to get you stuck permanently. In the battle area, there's an NPC living in a small island that wants to trade your finneon for his magikarp. If that finneon happens to be the only pokemon in your party, and you don't have a fishing rod or rare candies, then you're permanently stuck there.

Did a quick check with Strength when it comes to being able to lose it. Seems like they've taken things into account with at least that specific TM. The only Pokémon that I noticed would have that specific problem would be Grookey that can learn the move via breeding but that's probably just because HMs aren't a thing in Sword and Shield and it's not a TM either.

Here's another possibility that could have happened at least in older games if you could simply replace an HM with TM: Receive badge that allows you to use an HM, skip getting the HM, obtain a Pokémon that has the move (leveling up, breeding, trade), enter an area where it's needed, replace the move with a TM. Stuck. You can't relearn the move since you didn't pick up the HM.

I know these are Farfetch'd but that's just what edge cases are. I don't know if there are any other possible scenarios. These are just some that I came up with in short time. In the end, it's good that they just got rid of them completely.

I do hope they have made some changes to how they are handled in these new remakes. I really disliked fog in Gen 4. I made the mistake of entering a route without Defog and despite noticing I'd made a mistake, I pressed on and arrived in the next town after too many missed attacks to count. Made sure I had Defog the next time I had to enter an area with fog. Fortunately there aren't many in the first place.

EDIT: That tidbit about getting stuck after a trade was interesting. I was already thinking if it was possible to get stuck in Gen 2 via Tyrogue trade but I believe you can get out of there without HMs and Tyrogue probably learns the moves needed anyways.

Call me a meanie, but anyone dumb enough to get themselves trapped deserves it.

Maybe one in every Pokémon Centre? They already had a Move Tutor, I believe, in every Centre in Sword/Shield for learning old moves.

talking about art style, do you guys remember how good Battle Revolution looked on the Nintendo Wii? Not just the Pokémons, but the environment and moves. It's sad they can't do much better on a much more powerfull Nintendo Switch. Gosh I really miss Battle Revolution.

I'm being sincere when I say praising Battle Revolution by comparison is the harshest critique of modern Pokemon I've ever seen. Which is amazing, because I don't think you even meant it that way.

I do think we maybe need to accept that as long as Pokemon is in 3D, that we're never getting a Pokemon game again without some real compromises somewhere. Either that or Pokemon will start rotating 3 developers like Call of Duty does.

@kkslider5552000 Harshest critique? I don't think I meant that lol. Modern pokémon has higher polygon count than Battle Revolution, I think it's the cel shading or color choices that ruin modern pokémon, their pokémon size scaling and the atack animations that were so much better in Battle Revolution. I feel like game freak really needs third party help.

I'll always remember playing Colosseum and seeing a Wailord in a 3D battle for the first time.

Wailord in SwSh is hilarious tho. At least the one in the Isle of Armor does it justice.

Even though they have been made within Game Freak they already rotate teams I believe, the last 3 games of Let's Go, Sw/Sh and US/UM have had 3 different directors led teams with key personal floating about between them.

@RaphaBoss there was more soul to their animations and models.

The models in the modern 3DS era are just terrible simply put, very simple animations, bland textures, bad lighting (SWSH's tried to fix lighting but somehow it looks worse anywhere but that glowy forest area.), etc.

This is what the 3d era games should've use... the fact that they still don't look like this on the switch hardware is just a joke. We had pokedex 3d pro already done and they remade all the models with X/Y anyway.

I'm curious if that's true about BR's polygons, particularly the sinnoh ones.

@Eel It was only the one in the overworld, right? If you had one following you, or in battle, they were still incredibly small.

@jump Yeah, but they're not big enough to have three full teams. They only have around 150 employees IIRC. That's pretty much the average size team on any modern day game. They're limited by their own resources, or tight schedule. I wouldn't mind if they took some more years off, focused more on new games, and less on the filler like Let's GO and the remakes.