Topic: Pokémon Scarlet & Pokémon Violet

@Moonwatcher Sweet; link code is 9559 4673

@Fizza Ok, my IGN's Yris

@Moonwatcher Things are going great so far, just a small reminder to send the trade evos I need back to me if you don't mind: won't register in my dex otherwise if I'm not mistaken XD

@Fizza Ok, do you want me to cancel the evos on my end, so they'll evolve when I trase them back to you instead?

@Moonwatcher Nah, just send them back over; they'll register in the dex either way 👍

@Dogorilla There was one gym I inadvertently made challenging because I had captured Pokemon that were so high level by going in the 'wrong' direction that my Pokemon literally refused to follow my orders. 😝 The fight actually made for an interesting challenge.

@Fizza Is that everything? Any more trade evos you need?

@Moonwatcher No, I think I'm good. Would you mind sending the Ceruledge back over though? Got a bit of a personal attachment to it myself (and I'll send you on something nice in return ).

No problem. Sending it back now @Fizza

@Fizza Clefairy! Thanks very much for the trades

@Moonwatcher No problem at all! Apologies that I wasn't able to get a Miraidon for you but hopefully the other mons made up for it

Thanks a ton for helping out with those trade evos too! Just gotta get a few evos and the Loyal Three out of the way and I'll have the Teal Mask Pokedex finished just in time for Indigo Disk's release!

I feel like that's just because SM is more story focused than XY. BW had kind of the same feeling too. XY has many of the same issues as BW and SM, it just doesn't have a heavy story focus. The region is just as linear and I really didn't enjoy exploring it that much. "Just existing" isn't quite as fun IMO when you have nowhere to go but forward.

Really I don't really like the design of any of the 5th-7th gen regions, that era of the series has definitely felt like a step backwards (although I do like some of the things BW2 did to build on BW1). Honestly feels like there was almost nothing good from those games.

You shouldn't worry about having every single Pokemon game like it's some obligation to follow the entire series. Just get the games you like. I skipped LGPE for example, that game is an utter abomination and practically the antithesis of what I want in a Pokemon game, so I don't feel any guilt for not buying it.

If you've played Ultra Sun, you probably have a good idea of what XY is like. There's far less story in XY, but otherwise it's fairly similar to SM and USUM. If you've played BW that's also a good comparison to XY.

Honestly level scaling should be a must in an open world game. It undermines the gameplay otherwise. Sure, you could technically complete the game in any order, but that requires you to challenge a gym that's much stronger than your Pokemon currently are and makes the game very difficult.

Also, the recommended order for you to complete the game is VERY confusing. There was a meme about this that I unfortunately can't find, but basically it shows how Game Freak expected us to complete the game and it's a confusing mess having us criss-cross and go to random points throughout the region instead of something simplistic like clockwise/counterclockwise or south to north.

They've been able to create multiple rosters based on various points of progression throughout the game before (see: Vs. Seeker rematches, Emerald's gym leader rematches), and that should really be the solution here. No excuse to not start doing that by 10th gen at the latest.

@Bolt_Strike
Honestly the only game I don't want to play is gen 1. Plus a DS multi cart I have came with every mainline Pokemon on the system so that gave me a lot of games to play. Scarlet/ Violet and X/Y are the only wildcards in the series for me. So far Black or Omega Ruby is my favorite in the series.

@Bolt_Strike I disagree. Gen 5 is like one of the only regions I actually like in the series. I heavily disliked Sinnoh. Kanto was boring. Johto seems unfinished. Hoenn is decent, but far from my favorite. Univa is great despite being linear and Kalos is alright (would’ve been better if the game wasn’t screwed over by the move into 3D). Gen 7 was when O genuinely started to feel like I wanted to quit playing the series, with gen 8 only being more tolerable because the story wasn’t as intrusive. Gen 9 was the first time I enjoyed a game in the series since Gen 5 and 6.

@blindsquirrel

So, as a semi-bullet point list in no particular order:

The Open world is fun to just run around in. And unlike in lots of other open world games I’ve played, you get your “vehicle” to traverse it faster pretty much from the get go.

The quick travel back to places you’ve been not being linked to a HM, but being unlocked from the very start is great too. (Can’t remember if SWSH did this already, but it’s still a pro that they didn’t remove it if so)

The world is properly in 3d now, with the ability to jump, and later climb & glide.

Many people see it as a con, but not being able to go into houses, as my OCD requires I visit every one, and this way there’s way less loading screens for one line of filler dialogue.

Pokemon encounter are exclusively overworld now, like in LGPE or Legends: Arceus. You can avoid random battles against pokemon you don’t want to fight entirely, and can see shinies before confronting them.

Overworld trainer battles are optional. While you can still fight every trainer you come across, you have to interact with them yourself now, removing the need to ninja past random trainers to get back to the pokemon centers.

Then there’s the fact that it follows Legends: Arceus’ lead and has the battles taking place on the same overworld instead of a different battle screen, so even while in battle you feel more immersed in the world.

Camera mode. Looking around & taking pictures of both the world and pokemon. You can see the areas from a different angle, and pretend you’re playing pokemon snap.

The story and characters are the most consistently good in the series. While older games occasionally had good stories, it tended to be only a few characters. (Like N & Ghetsis, or Lusamine & family)
Here I like all the characters and their stories, even the box art legendary gets characterisation instead of being a plot device like in older games.

The pokemon models themselves have been updated and look way better than previous games.

Terastallizing being more like Z-moves, available all game and to every pokemon made it much more fun gimmick than Mega evos or Dynamax. It’s actually usable, and doesn’t break the game (outside of PVP at least) and it allows Gym Leaders to have more interesting pokemon, as they can have their ace match in Tera type instead of regular.

Useful battle items are available to buy early on, allowing items like Leftovers to be easily acquirable in the main story.

Bottle Caps and Nature Mints are available to buy outright, and the level for hyper training has been reduced to 50, essentially removing the need to breed for IVs and allowing your main story team to be converted to high end content with comparatively to no investment.

In addition, the Ev training held items available to buy right from the start, and not requiring BP to get them.

Most single use held items now are returned after battles, allowing items such as the Focus Sash to be used against in-game trainers without losing them.

Larry. Best Gym leader in the franchise.

While I personally didn’t like most of the new pokemon, I absolute LOVE Sprigatito. Plus it had enough old favourites like Shinx and Eevee that I managed to make a fun team anyway.

Rewards for every 10 species fully registered to the pokedex gives more of a reason to catch pokemon that you don’t plan on adding to your team. Also the new design for the pokedex pages, with the photograph of the pokemon

Without going into spoilers, the final battle of the main story was my favourite moment in mainline pokemon.

Although this is partially true, I can't count the number of times I was zooming along and ran into a Pokemon which had not yet visually loaded. So it felt like a random encounter. It was probably the one thing about the graphical performance which drove me a little crazy. Sure I could have avoided it by moving slowly, but who wants to move slowly? Plus sometimes when you were talking to someone or something a Pokemon would basically walk on top of you and make an unavoidable encounter.

Also, I wish they had made shinies a little more obvious. I accidentally killed a few without noticing.

I don't really blame you. Gen 1 was great for it's time, but it's aged like milk and doesn't really compare favorably to some of the more modern entries. Especially in terms of things like Pokemon variety, map size and design, and environmental variety, they couldn't really do much about them at the time because of a limited roster and the technical limitations of the Game Boy, but because later entries have improved in those areas they stick out like a sore thumb now. This is part of the reason I don't want anything to do with LGPE, because they didn't make the changes to Kanto that really needed to be made (with the other part of the equation being that because they wanted to make it like Go they changed some things that really shouldn't have been changed, really almost every decision they made for LGPE felt like the wrong one). Kanto really needs either a BW2-esque sequel (and no, GSCHGSS doesn't count because it didn't build on Kanto, it just tacked Johto onto the side like a conjoined twin and even CUT parts of Kanto to make them both fit) or an LA-esque reimagining to really feel like a quality experience in this decade.

Why? BW2's improvements were good as was the story (although really it's more the late game plot twists of BW1 than anything), but like with LGPE almost every decision they made with BW1 felt like the wrong one IMO. I mentioned the linearity. The decision to restrict you to only new Pokemon felt too intrusive and poorly executed with some of the new ones just designed to be clones of old ones (replacing Zubats and Geodudes in caves with Not Zubats and Not Geodudes feels largely pointless for example). The storyline started getting more intrusive. They decreased the difficulty with short gym leader rosters (why does it feel like it's illegal for most trainers to have more than 3 Pokemon?) and they had more tutorials which added to the intrusive cutscenes. And they removed so many QoL features and longtime side features/extra content. Contests were dumbed down into Musicals, Secret Bases, the Battle Frontier, the Game Corner (and granted the Game Corner needed to be axed because of EU gambling laws, but Voltorb Flip was a wonderful replacement for the slots that they failed to carry over), and the Safari Zone disappeared altogether, the C-Gear was a largely useless regional gadget that was just a glorified online portal whereas past gadgets like the Pokenav and Poketch (and especially the Poketch) had much more useful QoL features, longtime QoL features such as trainer rematches and berry planting largely disappeared. BW1 just felt stripped away and dumbed down in so many ways and there was little that I felt was improved from 4th gen, it felt like a baby step forwards and a giant leap backwards.

Again why? Sinnoh feels like one of the best designed regions in the series and had few flaws IMO (there were some variety issues in DP, but they got fixed in Platinum. Unfortunate that BDSP reverted them though by failing to include Platinum's expansions).

So you liked Unova and Kalos but hate Alola? Very unusual opinion here, since Unova, Kalos, and Alola follow a similar design philosophy. What, in your eyes, did Alola do wrong that Unova and Kalos didn't do?

I also felt ready to quit the series around Gen 7 but Gen 8 did enough to feel like there was hope and Gen 9 fully brought me back, but for different reasons. Exploration is very important to me, so the linearity of Unova, Kalos, and Alola rubbed me the wrong way (also some other factors to a lesser degree such as decreasing difficulty and content as well as intrusive storylines). When I saw that Galar, Hisui, and Paldea were experimenting with more open world gameplay though, that's what brought me back. The games finally felt explorable again with the shift to open world.

The sad thing with the shinies is they had the solution to this in LA but they removed it. In LA, whenever a shiny spawned in the area, a jingle played. That helps a lot, because then even if you're zooming by, if you hear the shiny jingle, you know to stop and look around nearby for it. This worked wonders for alerting you to shinies that you would otherwise zoom past, I have no clue why they removed this.

@Bolt_Strike I won't lie about Gen 5 basically being the beginning of what I dislike the more modern Pokemon titles for, being the extreme focus on linearity and running down hallways.. however I still feel like it isn't as bad as Gen 7 or 8 in that regard. While Gen 5 barely had optional areas, I still found Unova to be a very interesting region in its own right. You had places like the Dream Yard or Skyarrow Bridge. The desert resort within the middle of the region, and a town which was split between two instances of time. The music sells a lot of these locations for me along with how the game's general art style was at the time, being a blend of 3D and 2D in a way that made things actually seem grand. I didn't mind the restriction to only being able to utilize new Pokemon, and while the designs of the new pokemon were moreso rehashes of Gen 1's roster, I personally preferred them over Gen 1's roster. I'll easily take Woobat over Zubat any day. The storyline was more intrusive than Gen 4, but I didn't actually mind it at this point in the series. It still struck a balance between story and gameplay imo, and it didn't feel like the game stopped me at the worst times in order to dump things onto me. I guess it being in 2D also helped with the flow of the story, but I had no qualms with it. The characters were fairly enjoyable, and so I never minded that most of the plot kicked in within the last few moments of the game. Characters like N, Cheren, and Bianca are still some of my favorite rivals in the series to date. They felt like they actually had character growth and were more than your average "jerk rival" or later friendly rivals. The tutorials didn't seem that intrusive or even on the level of the games that came after either. Gym leaders had weaker rosters, which is true, but I felt like the fact that the gym leaders actually did something in the region and had more to them than being people you fight made up for that. That and I don't exactly look for challenge in Pokemon titles in the first place. Side content in the base game was a bit lacking, but generally it tends to be in most games outside of the third versions. Platinum in Gen 4 added most of gen 4's post-game content, and Black 2 and White 2 were no different for Gen 5. I still think Gen 5 was solid even without a ton of extra side content, and while it was the beginning of the downfall it was still my favorite out of the games I've played in the series.

Gen 4 itself is just bland imo. I don't have an attachment to it, since I didn't play it growing up. I had Platinum, but I never got far into it because I was a dumb child at the time, and I thought that teaching my Monferno only status moves was a good idea. In recent years I went to replay it, mainly right before PLA released. It wasn't a fun experience for me really. The region is probably the most bland one in my opinion, with most of it feeling like you're going through the same environments. The pokemon introduced in Gen 4 were better designed than the ones in gens 1-3, but I still don't exactly love them (my personal tastes for designs are Gen 5 and 7, with a bit of gen 8 thrown in). The storyline is fine, but its nothing to write home about. Cyrus is better written in Platinum.. but I still don't really care for him as a villain. The lore of Sinnoh is a bit interesting, but the legendary pokemon just don't really stand out to me. I have trouble picking between Palkia or Dialga, not because I love the designs but because they just look super bland. At least until Arceus gave them alternate forms that spiced them up. Gen 4 had a ton of side content, but a good amount of it just didn't click with me. I guess primarily because most of it was multiplayer, and I was playing on emulator years after the servers shut down for the original games. I also remember having to grind a ton just to be at the same level of gyms. I had to spend hours fighting wild pokemon all so that I could even stand up on equal footing to most of the gyms, and this was with the speed-up feature on emulator. Dread to think what it would've been like if I were playing on original hardware.

Gen 7 is where it all fell flat to me. While gen 5 is the gen that started the decline, gen 7 was rock bottom. While there are some things I liked about Kalos, a bunch of my opinion on the game changed in recent years given that I understand the circumstances to why it was the way that it was. Gen 7 on the other hand is primarily the only Pokemon title I genuinely can't be bothered to replay. Its unfortunate as well, since I really like some of the ideas the games present. Things like the new pokemon designs, some of the characters, a good amount of the music, and the vibes of the region itself. The issue mostly lies in the type of story they're telling, the way that towns function in the game, and the way that Alola is designed over all. While you said that Gen 5 had issues with linearity, it feels more free than what Alola felt like. Alola felt like you were genuinely just walking down hallway after hallway after hallway, with the game stopping the player in the middle of those hallways to have an encounter with a character. The encounters felt like they lasted forever as well, given how the cutscenes were blocked in the game itself. It wasn't enough that it was intrusive either, as they put these characters in the worst places. Biggest example of this is how Hau waits right outside of a pokemon center near the grass gym if you don't do the online tutorial. He forces you into it, instead of letting you heal your pokemon right after going through a route. Then with towns, a lot of the Towns in Alola have artificial road blocks that prevent you from exploring them when you first get to them. They do it mostly because they don't want surprises spoiled for the player, but it just felt cheap when the other games in the series ended up letting you explore at your own leisure. The storyline for Gen 7 is also something that I wasn't really invested in. It felt like your character exists only to be the bodyguard to another character. That you aren't really the main protagonist, outside of the league stuff. In Gen 5, I loved how you actually mattered to the plot, and it emphasized that this was your journey. In gen 7, it felt like you were on Lillie's journey and just fighting her battles for her. You could technically remove yourself from the plot and replace our character with Lillie, and nothing would actually change. On top of this, the characters are a mixed bag. You have some good ones like Guzma and Gladion, but then you also have people like Hau, who add absolutely nothing to the story. Hau feels like he's barely a step up from Gen 6's rivals, and had nothing going on in the base game. Even when they tried to give him an arc in Ultra, it felt like it just kind of crept in last minute. Gen 7 was also when cave design started to suffer for the series, with Gen 8 being the game where caves ended up dying outright. Outside of Poni Canyon, caves in Gen 7 got rid of multiple floors.

Finished the DLC awhile back, later then most. All I can say is it’s still really sad the games run so poorly, and that I adore Dipplin.

Took a break from finishing the pokedex this last weekend to casually shiny hunt eevees. Turns out I enjoy the outbreak method way more than the other ways in past games!

Now I just need a Miraidon to get the Shiny Charm so I can get even more!