(Little) Things that annoy you in Pokémon

[DrCoeloCephalo]

I dont think legends is a good counter argument that ivs are unnecessary to the variance design, as legends promotes a team switching, use multiple pokemon, catch everything you can playthrough.

Funnily, this actually applies to just about every other monster collector EXCEPT your average main series Pokemon game. You're generally encouraged to collect more monsters in order to create different teambuilds and strategies and deal with actually challenging upcoming bosses, which is something Pokemon also preaches given they put an emphasis on the PokeDex to collect more monsters and even in RBY, you could only get certain key items by catching more monsters and they play up how Gym Leaders and Elites are supposed to be a big deal but it ultimately fails in practice due to how the AI is dumber than dirt and the "bosses" not being that much stronger from your average NPC or wild encounter. They attempt to justify that under the shallow excuse of it being a game for kids, which doesn't actually work cuz kids like to be challenged and improve at games they love just like anyone else. You still get unique experiences anyway due to the skill gap between many people and their ability to improve. What may be an easy boss for some could actually go over the head of another player.

 

[Bakugames]

Funnily, this actually applies to just about every other monster collector EXCEPT your average main series Pokemon game. You're generally encouraged to collect more monsters in order to create different teambuilds and strategies and deal with actually challenging upcoming bosses, which is something Pokemon also preaches given they put an emphasis on the PokeDex to collect more monsters and even in RBY, you could only get certain key items by catching more monsters and they play up how Gym Leaders and Elites are supposed to be a big deal but it ultimately fails in practice due to how the AI is dumber than dirt and the "bosses" not being that much stronger from your average NPC or wild encounter. They attempt to justify that under the shallow excuse of it being a game for kids, which doesn't actually work cuz kids like to be challenged and improve at games they love just like anyone else. You still get unique experiences anyway due to the skill gap between many people and their ability to improve. What may be an easy boss for some could actually go over the head of another player.

I actually much prefer pokemon where I can use the pokemon I enjoy (in theory. Rip to anyone who has shitmons as their favorite loool) than constantly having to swap out for every other battle. The problem with most monster catchers that apply this is that you need to have multiple monsters at a decent level beyond the ones you carry for different bosses. Grinding in rpgs with a fixed party is extremely annoying (which is what pokemon soft emulates as you dont need to switch out your party too often unless its just the worst mons ever), having to grind from scratch because you need to catch 3 new monsters that are almost necessary to counter the new boss is even more so. At that point the difficulty of the game depends much less on tactics for a boss as it is spending time leveling up new guys. Its a bit zzzz.

I would enjoy pokemon hard modes, but I still want to use a team that I enjoy for the most part and instead just need to think more on a gym leader instead of pressing super effective button x6

Respectfully, all of these points are fluff.

Grit Values add individual variance without being as rigid as IVs. The context of the game isn't exactly relevant to the discussion.

Why wouldn't it be? Legends and main series plays differently, the way you interact with pokemon in the game are completely different, the relevance of ivs is also different on them. I have my own issues with grit ivs (its bad lol), but theres better alternatives than using legends as an example tbh

 

[KalosianPorygon]

While you are talking about IVs and how bumpy the road to creating a complete competitive team is, yesterday I watched videos from a seasoned Nuzlocke player who says he hates EV training because it's boring and tedious and expensive; he also praises Radical Red's Minimal Grinding mode because it maxes out IVs and removes EVs.

Meme time!

 

[Bakugames]

It is a bit weird that we havent had any good ev optimizations. The ev up items are extremely expensive and only work up to a point, in which you just have to take the L. Hell, forced exp share means your team either all need to need similar evs or you gotta deposit them all and only keep your ev grinder.

I would at least let ev items work for all 252 evs. Super expensive but at least you could use it

 

[AztecCroc]

and only work up to a point

Gen 8 actually removed that stupid mechanic where you couldn't use vitamins to max out EVs.

 

[DrCoeloCephalo]

I actually much prefer pokemon where I can use the pokemon I enjoy (in theory. Rip to anyone who has shitmons as their favorite loool) than constantly having to swap out for every other battle.

You should probably try actually playing these other games then because if that's what you want, you can still do that by being good at the game. Even moreso since you have leagues more wiggle room to not just make common low tier monsters stronger but also since they have far more casual ingame content and better balanced metagames that Pokemon lacks which would allow for monsters you like to be useful in meaningful ways.

 

[KalosianPorygon]

Math time: EV training in Galar

Let's say you want a Pokémon with 252 EVs on two stats and 4 EVs on another.
Each nutritious drink gives 10 EVs. One drink costs ₽10,000 in Galar.
That's (16+16+1) * 10,000 = ₽33,000 for one Pokémon.
You have 5 other Pokémon to train. That's 33,000 * 6 = ₽198,000 for a whole team.

Oh yeah, and you had to find a good way to grind money.

The best part is, you can mess your training! If you raised the wrong EVs, you had to use Berries. And in Galar's Dynamax-polluted soil, you can't grow Berries. Instead, you have to shake trees uglier than the notorious N64 trees and risk becoming RNGsus' next victim.

Seriously, I want Berry Pots back. Best feature from HGSS, fight me.

 

[Bakugames]

Gen 8 actually removed that stupid mechanic where you couldn't use vitamins to max out EVs.

I never used the vitamins a lot bc expensiv that i completely forgot. Thank god they did this, would have enjoyed if they lowered the price or at least made areas thats easier to grind evs on (like a patch that only shows pkmn that give 2 or more evs in attack or smthing)

You should probably try actually playing these other games then because if that's what you want, you can still do that by being good at the game. Even moreso since you have leagues more wiggle room to not just make common low tier monsters stronger but also since they have far more casual ingame content and better balanced metagames that Pokemon lacks which would allow for monsters you like to be useful in meaningful ways.

Ive been playing other monster catcher games, but the monster designs certainly makes it hard for me to enjoy a good chunk even if ther mechanics are good. Some fall onto just grind pitfall that i mentioned (or other pitfalls that makes the games unpleasant). The ones that are more successful in letting me use my favorite guys were coromon and monhun stories 2 (though this one was more out of stubborness. Gameplay is focused on swapping out for high rarity monsters as you progress but i completely loaded my favorite 3 star guy so he could still be usable for longer LOL)

 

[DrCoeloCephalo]

Ive been playing other monster catcher games, but the monster designs certainly makes it hard for me to enjoy a good chunk even if ther mechanics are good.

That one's hard to argue. Ya certainly can't change someone's preferences for monster designs. Only they can choose to do that. I guess I'm just alot less shallow than most, given some of my favorite monsters include Jynx and Mr. Mime. Neither of those are winning popularity polls in aesthetic on top of being low tier trash. Brock's Vulpix episode teaching one to value a monster's inner strength has always stuck with me. I certainly wouldn't complain if Jynx and Mr. Mime were better both casually and competitively tho, assuming the Pokemon game in question I was playing allowed me to use them. Then again, that's also part of the beauty of a game like this. Once you've gotten good, you have way more freedom to just not use monsters you don't want to.

 

[Sonikku A]

It gets worse.

All this in-game talk about bonding with your mons, only to find out that the crew you rolled with and conquered an entire region is unsalvageable garbage in comp/post-game facilities for the most part.

Yeah...
I didn't care if it made my joke hack easy, I just hated how IVs and abilities were locked. So for post game I gave the player ways to raise IVs, regardless of level, and some egg moves in level up learnset

Cuz like...so much for sticking with your bestie, if comp says otherwise

 

[KalosianPorygon]

Here's a bigger question than anything battle-related:
Why does every Pokétuber pronounces Whiscash as Wish-cash? There's so "sh" sound in "whisker".

 

[Imperial Magala]

Math time: EV training in Galar

Let's say you want a Pokémon with 252 EVs on two stats and 4 EVs on another.
Each nutritious drink gives 10 EVs. One drink costs ₽10,000 in Galar.
That's (16+16+1) * 10,000 = ₽33,000 for one Pokémon.
You have 5 other Pokémon to train. That's 33,000 * 6 = ₽198,000 for a whole team.

Oh yeah, and you had to find a good way to grind money.

The best part is, you can mess your training! If you raised the wrong EVs, you had to use Berries. And in Galar's Dynamax-polluted soil, you can't grow Berries. Instead, you have to shake trees uglier than the notorious N64 trees and risk becoming RNGsus' next victim.

Seriously, I want Berry Pots back. Best feature from HGSS, fight me.

I got my berries from raid battles alongside sellable items and the occasion bottle cap. G-Max Meowth grinding in the Galar Tournament was how I got my money primarily. Also you can buy vitamins in the dojo in bulk of 25 for ₽125,000, or ₽5,000 each.

 

[Siggu]

Save for the limitless Vitamins part... to think they had actually got EV Training right in Alola. SOS Chaining letting you max an EV in 7 Pokémon if you got the right conditions, and Evelup Island giving the option to train the exact amount of EVs while you were doing something else with your life.

Just... give a "personal trainer" NPC that works as an EV customization feature, adding and removing points as if it were Showdown.

 

[DrCoeloCephalo]

Here's a bigger question than anything battle-related:
Why does every Pokétuber pronounces Whiscash as Wish-cash? There's so "sh" sound in "whisker".

I don't watch PokeTubers of any kind in the first place due to the samey content they make, so this is news to me. It goes without saying that it's obvious they're pronouncing the name wrong. That's kind of another reason why I vouch for voice acting in Pokemon. The game itself can tell you how the monster's name is pronounced.

 

[Scorpio]

Math time: EV training in Galar

Let's say you want a Pokémon with 252 EVs on two stats and 4 EVs on another.
Each nutritious drink gives 10 EVs. One drink costs ₽10,000 in Galar.
That's (16+16+1) * 10,000 = ₽33,000 for one Pokémon.
You have 5 other Pokémon to train. That's 33,000 * 6 = ₽198,000 for a whole team.

Oh yeah, and you had to find a good way to grind money.

There is indeed a good way to grind money. It’s called the Cram-o-Matic.

you have to shake trees uglier than the notorious N64 trees

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I do agree that not being able to grow berries is irksome tho, especially after the previous generation basically went “Why waste time scouring the region for Ethers when they literally grow on trees?”

 

[DrCoeloCephalo]

People have every reason to call out ugly graphics when the devs claim to promise better graphics in exchange for cutting content and putting it behind paywalls and scamworthy services.

Why should I pay 18 bucks a year hoping shallow, low tier monsters with no personality are in storage will be available in an ugly game when I can play a better game with all past monsters available and environments that are beautiful in screenshots?

 

[Coronis]

So obviously as a current non-competitive player I might be a bit biased but whatever. So obviously the games are never gonna be perfect or necessarily top tier games due to their release schedule amongst other factors, but I’d be preferring they spent more time on story/ingame features rather than making things easier for competitive players. I mean it makes sense (at least to me), clearly casual players make up a vast majority of the sales and will continue to do so. Raising a decent competitive Pokemon has had a lotta quality of life updates recently anyway and is much easier than before but I mean its basically a post game thing and should have a level of difficulty ascribed to it.

 

[DrCoeloCephalo]

If you play an actually good monster collector, you tend to find tons of casual content as well as polish and convenience to building a meta team.

For whatever reason, Pokemon is probably the only monster collector I've played where there's some unnecessary sacrifice to one side or the other.

 

[KalosianPorygon]

I have yet to see a reason behind shitmons that aren't justified in the lore. Especially rare ones.
Take, I dunno, Yanma for example. Why is it so rare, why was it so bad?

I don't know much about other monster collectors, but does Yo-Kai Watch for example have a stable, fun competitive scene?

 

[QuentinQuonce]

I have yet to see a reason behind shitmons that aren't justified in the lore. Especially rare ones.
Take, I dunno, Yanma for example. Why is it so rare, why was it so bad?

...does there have to be a reason?

No, but really. In a game centred around rooting out elusive monsters from a variety of locales,, rare does not and should not necessarily equal strong. Junk rare is a trope in all manner of video games, though Pokemon admittedly does go quite hard on it.

The games even make this point explicitly. A Gentleman on the SS Anne in RGBYFRLG asks "which would you prefer, a strong or a rare Pokemon?" - one does not imply the other. Some of the game's most powerful Pokemon, like Alakazam, Machamp, Gyarados, Gardevoir, and Slaking, are all extremely common. This is not to say that there aren't strong and rare species - Tauros, Heracross, Milotic, Kingdra, Lapras, Lucario - but there's variety in the species available.

And for a lot of people (me included) this is part of the charm of the series. Convoluted methods of obtaining Pokemon can sometimes be frustrating, but I'd argue it's far preferable to making every Pokemon easily accessible. That'd get very dull very quickly. Admittedly I tend to look up the stats and details about Pokemon as soon as new games come out, but I'm sure lots of people don't - and they may well enjoy the discovery element of trying out what they catch and finding that the Pokemon they took a while to obtain isn't all that.

To get back to the point, I genuinely don't see why being uncommon should make a Pokemon powerful. Pokemon Go also does this quite well with regionals IMO - most of the regionals are Pokemon which in the main series aren't spectacular (Corsola, Tropius, Farfetch'd, Mr Mime, Pachirisu, Bouffalant, the elemental monkeys et al) but their scarcity has done a lot to renew my interest in them.

 

[Samtendo09]

[…] though Pokemon admittedly does go quite hard on it.

Well, as if it wasn’t obvious enough, they went overboard with too many Johto Pokémon in both GSC and HGSS in terms of scarcity, making the dex completion feels unaccomplishing due to too many of them being unremarkable and / or locked to Kanto.

Even if Hoenn have it’s share of problems (i.e. too many duo single-stage Pokémon that aren‘t anything special), at the very least it managed to have a good mix of readily available good Pokémon, readily available weak Pokémon, rare and strong Pokémon and rare but weak Pokémon.

 

[QuentinQuonce]

Well, as if it wasn’t obvious enough, they went overboard with too many Johto Pokémon in both GSC and HGSS in terms of scarcity, making the dex completion feels unaccomplishing due to too many of them being unremarkable and / or locked to Kanto.

Even if Hoenn have it’s share of problems (i.e. too many duo single-stage Pokémon that aren‘t anything special), at the very least it managed to have a good mix of readily available good Pokémon, readily available weak Pokémon, rare and strong Pokémon and rare but weak Pokémon.

In this instance you have to keep in mind the design principles of GSC as opposed to RSE; they were designed as sequels. The Johto species largely aren't prominent in GSC because they were intended to be rare and unknown and not instantly accessible.

RSE broke with the old regions and was allowed to be its own animal. In RS, the majority of returning Kanto and Johto species are stuffed into the Safari Zone late in the game, with only a few showing up in the wild. But the Hoenn Pokemon were intended to be showcased first and foremost. That wasn't the intention with the Johto species - in-game, they're as mysterious to the NPCs as they are to us. Slowking, for instance, is never seen and is only hinted at. You have to work out how to evolve it yourself, assuming you're not using a guide.

Do I like this? In concept, yes. In execution much less so. I wish HGSS at least had taken some care to tweak Pokemon availability (even if it was just following Crystal's alterations), because the Johto Pokemon never really got to take the spotlight in their own region; they honestly get a better showing in Colosseum.

But Johto is the extreme example where junk rares are concerned. They're much less frequent in other regions, though still definitely a thing.

 

[DrCoeloCephalo]

I don't know much about other monster collectors, but does Yo-Kai Watch for example have a stable, fun competitive scene?

Simply put, yes.

Japanese players even after all these years continue to discover new teambuilds that prove just as effective against more meta teams in high ladder.

There is a lore and a power gap towards God-level deity monsters but that doesn't mean the common low Rank monsters are unviable. Tons of them are viable. It's just a matter of teambuilding skill. It also helps that they rebalanced more overcentalizing monsters such as Slimamander in YKW2.

It's alot like Draft League meta.

The game didn't even have to make needless sacrifices to its amounts of casual content either, so even if a monster you like is on the unviable side, it doesn't matter that much since the game has so many other things you can use them for like postgame bosses, quests and online compatible real time roguelike exploration.

TLDR; It is entirely possible to have a quality competitive meta and vast casual content in a video game without sacrificing to one or the other.

Pokemon is just very bad at that.

...does there have to be a reason?

To get back to the point, I genuinely don't see why being uncommon should make a Pokemon powerful. Pokemon Go also does this quite well with regionals IMO - most of the regionals are Pokemon which in the main series aren't spectacular (Corsola, Tropius, Farfetch'd, Mr Mime, Pachirisu, Bouffalant, the elemental monkeys et al) but their scarcity has done a lot to renew my interest in them.

Pokemon has always played up the mascot Pikachu as being a special, rare and strong monster in the many ways they depict it.

The disappointing reality is that while it has low encounter rates or is treated as a special Starter monster, it's an unevolved, weak, low tier monster and they never bother articulating why that has to be the case but instead try to cushion the issue by giving it things like Light Ball and Volt Tackle. They even give it a pumped up stat spread in the main series game Let's Go.

Pokemon games also make a big deal about rare Dragon and pseudo Legendary monsters like the Bagon, Dratini and Deino lines among others. They're hard to get, hard to raise and end up being strong investments. They have a lore explaining that.

Meanwhile, they'll put Volbeat behind a 1% encounter rate in RSE and as far as I know, they never once explained why they did that.

 

[Siggu]

I don't know much about other monster collectors, but does Yo-Kai Watch for example have a stable, fun competitive scene?

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth does have a competitive scene, though since it's just one game (well, one, an expansion and a compilation), the scene is rather small.

 

[Imperial Magala]

Monster Hunter Stories 2 has PvP, but is honestly second to the PvE, which makes sense since that's how the main games roll, being exclusively about cooperation. Considering PvP features highlights like lack of viable Dragon or Water monsters/moves, an overbloated Fire monster pool, and Elder Dragons being immune to traps, it's a good thing PvE is pretty solid. I don't think any of the notably popular Shin Megami Tensei or Persona games have PvP due to being exclusively single player games with a heavier focus on story. Honestly Pokemon's fine due to the terms "causal" and "competitive" being so nebulous towards Pokemon. Do we consider hard story battles causally appealing due to being part of the main story, or competitively appealing due to requiring outside thinking to success? What about alternative battle modes such as contests, raids, or facilities?