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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
Yes. But this was under the assumption that it was the Platinum Pokédex in the first place. I have HEAVY doubts that they’d show a Pokémon unusable until postgame. Of course, it could be likely that GF could pull a fast one on me, but I’m just gonna go with the mindset that it will be available as a gift pokemon in BD/SP
Oh I was under the assumption that you were referring to the original DP for some reason
That's on me haha
Sorry about that
Also it's a killer dancer, as shown
Rowlet and Dartrix are based off the doctor from Doctor Who. You know... bow tie... also similarish hair. Rowlet also kind of looks like it's wearing the same brown coat as David Tennant. Get it? Doctor HOO?
There's a million ways to disprove my unpopular opinion but I refuse to accept reality.
There's a million ways to disprove my unpopular opinion but I refuse to accept reality.
Current Shiny Charizard is IMO the better shiny for me because come on black is such a cool color, but Gen 2 Shiny Charizard is literally just Ridley from Metroid and I love it for that
While we're on the topic of unpopular Shiny opinions, I don't get why so many people dislike green and pink Shinies. Sure some of them ae actually downright vomit inducing (looking at you Ursaring), but there are a lot of green and pink Shinies that people hate that I love. Probably the biggest example of this for me is Espeon. It's such a nice, deep shade of emerald green, yet everybody compares it to snot. Same goes for Sharpedo; I love that shade of deep magenta, yet everybody hates on it for being pink.
Personally, the worst Shiny color for me is yellow. It's ironic because yellow is my favorite color, and there are some great yellow Shinies (Azumarill and Luxray come to mind). But there's this specific shade of yellow that looks like piss to me, and they slap it on some of my favorite Pokémon. Arcanine, Lucario, and Floatzel had so much potential for cool Shinies, and they literally made them look like they've been drenched in piss. If they had just given them the same deep gold color that they had given Azumarill and Luxray, I would love them. But no; they had to go for piss yellow.
Yeah, when I was tweaking shiny colors, I noticed green was a good highlighter
Christmas tree Chansey and Clefable come to mind
Weird how dark brown is never used for shinies outside Chestnaught....who'd look better if the normal was the shiny
There's also Alolan Raichu, which is also a great Shiny
But yeah, I don't think there are any other brown Shinies aside from those two. I think it's because they used to pick Shinies from computer-generated color palettes, and since dark brown is a mixture of all other colors, it very rarely shows up on computer-generated color palettes.
...Or they want to avoid having Shinies compared to poop :P
Green: The problem with green isn't the color itself but the shade of green they choose. It can easily make the Pokemon look sickly than just it's color is green.
Pink: This is probably due to a lot of blue Pokemon for some reason turning pink during the early gens when they seemingly were using a pallet swapper program for a majority of the Pokemon.
does a mon like regirock count. he is already brown but stays brown.
pink/purple shiny mons are close to my favorite
Catching up. I'm kinda salty I missed the difficulty discussion, but I gotta address another post first.
Impossible. Matter of fact, it has been since at least Gen 2 and I can personally confirm this having attempted to do so hacking Stadium 2.
You can make a couple adjustments while trying to not step on another mon's niche, but even then you need to immediately recognize not all mons are going to be winners. At best you'll be able to give them an identity and hope they'll be fun in the lower tiers.
Pory-Z can be obtainable in DP at the Trophy Garden, it's just post-game. (Unlike in Platinum, Mr. Backlot doesn't run his mouth until you get the Nat. Dex)
Obviously though, it's a potential clue that the Sinnoh Dex is in fact, expanded from the abysmal DP Dex.
There's actually a very simple way to make the battles at least more interesting.
Thematic team building. Game Freak is no stranger to the idea, even in modern times, Kabu is a perfect example of what I mean.
A huge problem with Rom Hacks is that they often fall into the obvious pitfalls of stupid optimized major battles, fully evolved mons when the player doesn't have access to good tools, or alternatively a bunch of pseudos everywhere late-game, level spikes everywhere, and crazy level inflation.
You'll notice that all of these usually promote mindless grinding so that the player can actually push through those. No strategic value whatsoever.
Now let's go back to Kabu. Kabu does have some interesting tricks up his sleeve. Instead of going with a basic hyper offense team, as expected of Fire trainers, his team is designed around spreading burns with Will-O-Wisp.
The result? His team becomes much more interesting because there's a strategic flavor involved. You can't just pull up with any old Rock-type and expect an easy sweep, matter of fact, even a mon like Drednaw, otherwise a hard counter, doesn't want to take a Will-O-Wisp.
Naturally, Game Freak pulled their punches too much and made him a wimp anyway, but there's still value in that approach because they gave Kabu an identity that other leaders, for example, Flannery, didn't have.
Flannery is the exact opposite, her identity is much more in line with the hyper offensive Fire specialist I mentioned earlier, but she still manages to stand out because of her tactic of combining Overheat (and at mid-game that thing is a serious concern) and a White Herb to remove Overheat's drawback.
Impossible. Matter of fact, it has been since at least Gen 2 and I can personally confirm this having attempted to do so hacking Stadium 2.
You can make a couple adjustments while trying to not step on another mon's niche, but even then you need to immediately recognize not all mons are going to be winners. At best you'll be able to give them an identity and hope they'll be fun in the lower tiers.
Pory-Z can be obtainable in DP at the Trophy Garden, it's just post-game. (Unlike in Platinum, Mr. Backlot doesn't run his mouth until you get the Nat. Dex)
Obviously though, it's a potential clue that the Sinnoh Dex is in fact, expanded from the abysmal DP Dex.
There's actually a very simple way to make the battles at least more interesting.
Thematic team building. Game Freak is no stranger to the idea, even in modern times, Kabu is a perfect example of what I mean.
A huge problem with Rom Hacks is that they often fall into the obvious pitfalls of stupid optimized major battles, fully evolved mons when the player doesn't have access to good tools, or alternatively a bunch of pseudos everywhere late-game, level spikes everywhere, and crazy level inflation.
You'll notice that all of these usually promote mindless grinding so that the player can actually push through those. No strategic value whatsoever.
Now let's go back to Kabu. Kabu does have some interesting tricks up his sleeve. Instead of going with a basic hyper offense team, as expected of Fire trainers, his team is designed around spreading burns with Will-O-Wisp.
The result? His team becomes much more interesting because there's a strategic flavor involved. You can't just pull up with any old Rock-type and expect an easy sweep, matter of fact, even a mon like Drednaw, otherwise a hard counter, doesn't want to take a Will-O-Wisp.
Naturally, Game Freak pulled their punches too much and made him a wimp anyway, but there's still value in that approach because they gave Kabu an identity that other leaders, for example, Flannery, didn't have.
Flannery is the exact opposite, her identity is much more in line with the hyper offensive Fire specialist I mentioned earlier, but she still manages to stand out because of her tactic of combining Overheat (and at mid-game that thing is a serious concern) and a White Herb to remove Overheat's drawback.
While I'm here, I have a pretty split opinion (I think). A lot of pokemon are not lazily designed, even the Vanillite line and the Trubbish line. When people say they are kinda lazy, I tend to disagree. When you look at the rest of gen 5, a lot of pokemon have good designs, for example, the Timburr line and the Solosis line. People may say they are far more creative, but then think about how they wanted a literal trash-based pokemon. Notice how Trubbish is only found on Route 5, 16, and 4? The three routes surrounding Nimbasa City, which is a very large city. For Vanillite, they wanted an ice cream pokémon, so they made one. I would even say that the designs aren't lazy even still in Sword and Shield. In fact, I would go so far as to say gen 1 pokemon are generally more lazily designed.
A "simple" way to fix it is, just like the examples you mentioned, by introducing a mechanic. Rather than just taking three/four Pokémon of a type, giving it a TM move, and a higher level than the previous trainers, they should be themed about teaching the player how to deal with a certain mechanic, such as:
- Held items (like Flannery, or Tate & Liza in Emerald)
- Status conditions (like Kabu)
- Weather (like Raihan)
- Spread moves in which one of their Pokémon is immune to (like Tate & Liza in Emerald)
- Terrains
- Speed control
- Misdirection (e.g. Follow Me)
- Type coverage (like Ilima)
Gym Leaders are supposed to be tests for trainers, but most of the time it looks like they are only testing if you know the type chart.
Norman's gym in Emerald seemed to have this idea in mind, but with each trainer having only one mon, it didn't work.
(And the majority of gyms should be double battle oriented, as it's the official format)
I agree with you on this for the most part. I think many designs (especially gen 5 pokemon and inanimate objects) get flack just because people don't like them. They're not necessarily lazy designs (although some definitely are, I'm looking at you klink line), but they're also not always good designs, which is why they get the hate. Also, gen 5 specifically kind of tried to recapitulate gen 1, which resulted in lots of "parallel" pokemon (timburr line = machop line, throh & sawk = hitmonchah & hitmonlee, etc). Imo it's tbh kinda uninspired, but I understand their motives.
In regard to gen 1 pokemon being more lazily designed, I think that has more to do with the simplicity of their designs due to the scope of the franchise and available hardware at the time rather than laziness.
Also works. Making an unique identity for each leader is good, you can even stack some of those concepts.
I don't quite agree with a couple examples because the game in-universe is not a tutorial, but certain things can be applied, especially on the held items, by using more of them.
While a Choice Band is relatively straight-forward, you could have Leaders like say, Piers giving his Toxtricity a Throat Spray to use with Overdrive and Boomburst. That introduces players to some of the most complex item usage instead of "give the ace a Sitrus and call it a day."
Now that I think about it, I do have to agree with the simplicity comment. I can point out some examples of lazy design, but now that I think about it Pokemon like Charizard are just simple due to the available technology, but you can't deny that Pokemon like Rapidash and Tauros seem pretty lazy (In my eyes at least).
While I can see where you're coming from, did they not do this in almost every gen? While not the best example, they took so many of the more popular Pokemon from gen 1 (Notably Pikachu, Clefairy, and Golbat) and gave them new evolutions.
The Vanillite line is actually one of the most cleverly designed Pokemon out there when you really think about it. Yes, on the surface it looks like sentient ice cream, but there's a bit more to it than that. While they invoke the appearance of ice cream, their bodies, especially the "cone" parts, are actually ice, while Vanillish and Vanilluxe have appearances on their bottom halves resembling icicles as well as an ice cream cone at the same time, but they are also intended to look like stalactites in a cave. The "ice cream" is actually snow as well, and it's covering their body and underneath they are actually solid ice, which if you melted the snow off would make their raw faces more visible.
When you think about it, there's quite a lot going on, as they're also designed to simultaneously designed with snow and icicles integrated into their design while invoking the appearance of ice cream. It's even better when you learn that Casteliacones in Unova were modeled after Vanillite, which is great as it makes a Pokemon tie itself into a region's culture.
James Turner designed this line iirc, and he also designed some really great designs like Golurk, Vullaby and Mandibuzz (these two are incredibly cleverly designed imho), Centiskorch, Polteageist, and the Galarian Zigzagoon line, Obstagoon included.
I have to agree, the Vullaby may not be my favorite, but I do agree that it is very well designed.
I myself had not noticed that, and it really is very interesting compared to something like Pidgeot.
I think theres a difference between simple and lazy. Some designs can be simple and still be creative and interessing (trubbish and vanillite lines). Some concepts are better done simplisticaly, and not everything needs to be a complex cool design to be a good one.
On the other hand, you have designs that are simple because they have nothing going on with them. Rapidash is a unicorn on fire because they wanted to do an unicorn on fire. They weren't trying to make a creative design or anything, they just wanted a fire horse.
I think thats what differenciates the old pokémon designs to the new and simple ones. Gen 1 and gen 2 have a lot of simple designs with nothing really going on, just a generic animal x elemental power or generic kaiju number 32. While this isn't a wrong design approach, it is very shallow compared to newer gens, and has some pretty boring results sometimes (e.g rattata, ponyta)
On the other hand, you have designs that are simple because they have nothing going on with them. Rapidash is a unicorn on fire because they wanted to do an unicorn on fire. They weren't trying to make a creative design or anything, they just wanted a fire horse.
I think thats what differenciates the old pokémon designs to the new and simple ones. Gen 1 and gen 2 have a lot of simple designs with nothing really going on, just a generic animal x elemental power or generic kaiju number 32. While this isn't a wrong design approach, it is very shallow compared to newer gens, and has some pretty boring results sometimes (e.g rattata, ponyta)
Now the real question is: What design could we consider "lazy" if it overlaps so much with simple designs?
I think this is kinda subjective, but I'd say seismitoad is a lazy design, or at least a lazy concept. We already have the politoad line of water frogs, plus quagsire and swampert are relatively similar in concept being water/ground amphibian-like pokemon. By the time seismitoad rolled out, the concept was already supersaturated, and his design imo is quite subpar and lazy. He doesn't look interesting or fill a design niche that any of the other aforementioned pokemon don't cover. Sure his design is frog + speakers/warts which you can argue is unique enough, but I just think it's a lazy design. Another is the klinglang line, which is just various gears strapped together with eyes. Like what is the inspiration? There's barely any changes between evolutions either. Magnemite and megneton are similar in concept but they work because there's more to their design that just a magnet with eyes. Plusle and minun are also pretty lazy, even as far as pikaclones go. They do have the double battle gimmick, but I just don't see their design being enough of a departure from skinny pikachu with a +/- theme. I think when it comes down to it, a "lazy" design is pretty subjective. Imo most gen 1 and gen 2 designs get a free pass since the franchise was just starting out and didn't have a strong sense of direction.
I don't know if it's an unpopular opinion, but I think simple designs are better than complex designs (with the best designs being in-between the two). This is definitely noticeable with legendaries throughout the generations.
Don't insult my baby like this bro. It uses the glands of amphibians to form a sound speaker shape. It's ground not only because it's based on earth frogs, but because it causes seismic activity with its own vibrations (from the sound speakers, so it all comes back). It's a simple but effective design. Plus he's cute :')
It is subjective for the most part, but I think if a pokémon is Just a generic animal with nothing else going on for it (not even trying to reference the fauna and/or culture of the region), you're probably landing too close on "simple because it's lazy" territory in my opinion. Something like rattata or pidgey: There isn't anything really going on with these lines other than "rat" and "bird".
In fact, rattata and alolan rattata are the perfect examples for "simple because it's lazy" vs "simple but effective": Kantonian rattata/raticate is a rat.
Alolan rattata/raticate is a rat based on an invasive species that is also partially inspired by stereotypical criminal gangs, having a direct link with the detective Javan mongoose (imported as a form of pest control for rats in Hawaii) yumgoos/gumshoos. Despite not being that different from the kantonian forms, and still being pretty simple by themselves, they bring out way more interesting concepts to the table and are much more inspired.
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But now look at BW and B2W2's Pokedex. Neither game has any of those Pokemon, and having 2 water/ground Pokemon doesn't mean that the next will be a complete rip-off of them. I personally like the idea of a poisonous frog, which I don't think has been used past Seismitoad (correct me if I'm wrong) and what type could they use for that? Looking at the obvious types, there is grass, water, and poison. While I do think water/poison would have been smarter, it still works out for it to be water/ground I guess.
Edit: Thanks Lemingue for telling me why ground typing works well.
This I can definitely agree with, but when do we draw the line for complicated? I have no idea what we could define as complicated, as it is very easy to view things as very complicated, but then look later and see it as very simple.