immortalfrieza said:
1. The stories of Pokemon games need to be more immersive and detailed. This article is a good example of something that would greatly help breathe life into this stale franchise: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/109149-Game-Freak-Wont-Let-Pokemon-Players-Be-Bad
Ketsuban said:
I disagree with the premise that the franchise is stale, which rather undermines this point entirely. The stories have been improving since the very beginning - Gen IV had a man trying to erase existence and recreate it without emotion due to his own lack of emotional response. Gen V has a man trying to disarm the entire population of a country, by systematically abusing his only son into believing he's helping Pokémon by freeing them because they're his friends, in order to gain control of it by being the only man with a gun.
The premise of the franchise is stale because it's hardly changed since the first game. There's been no massive overhauls of the mechanics, just the graphics and most importantly and the stories are STILL not the focus of the games when they should be the entire point of the game. As it is, they could remake a bunch of old Pokemon games and remove Team Rocket, Aqua, Magma, Galactic, and Plasma and you probably wouldn't even notice or care that they were gone, and the evil organizations are the only thing that adds any story to the game whatsoever, but hardly any.
immortalfrieza said:
2. The overall plot of Pokemon games needs to change.
Ketsuban said:
Team Rocket were unapologetically moustache-twirlingly evil. Team Aqua and Team Magma were just plain incompetent because the story in Gen III was substantial but goofy. Team Galactic and Team Plasma were hapless because they had no executive direction due to their very existence being a cover for more malign dealings. The overall trend is towards the evil team being less and less relevant as anything other than a source of battles.
I should also point out that the two games you pick up as examples of changing the formula (Colosseum and XD) sold terribly.
While it's true that the Evil Organization in Pokemon games has had more complex reasons for their evil, what they do is rarely menacing. For instance, while their ultimate goal may be world domination/destruction, they never destroy much at all, attack anyone besides you with Pokemon, don't steal things much, etc. This is not how an evil organization should be, the Pokemon region that the game is based in at large should dread and fear them, and you should fight them out of a sense of justice and altruism rather than that beating them will get you _____ item which is needed to get pass ______ obstacle.
Oh, and Colosseum sold over 2 million units worldwide, which is a massive amount. I wasn't able to find how many Pokemon XD sold but considering how good it is I doubt it bombed.
immortalfrieza said:
3. People like me that grew up with Pokemon are being completely ignored, no attempts are being made to keep us hooked. They need to find a way to serve all ages, not just kids.
Ketsuban said:
You aren't actually identifying any faults or proposing anything better. What's wrong with the current system? ("It's only being marketed for kids" isn't a fault - if you don't market to kids you become the Comic Book Guy. Adults don't need something they already know exists and find fun to be rubbed in their faces.)
Yeah, actually being marketed solely to kids IS a fault, it is a major fault because it also means that they're designing it solely for kids too. I'm not saying that they shouldn't still market Pokemon to children, but putting in material that walks the line between all ages and marketing it as an all ages game would not only keep their younger audience hooked but help bring back old players and probably bring in new older gamers too, which I'm surprised they haven't really done since it would help increase the mountain of cash they get.
immortalfrieza said:
4. The mechanics of Pokemon battles need to hurpyburpy
(that's not even close to what I said)
Ketsuban said:
It does not take a huge amount of effort to rotate Pokémon around in your party so they all get equal experience. You're just being lazy.
Is it lazy for me to not want to have to go through the tediousness of rotating each and EVERY Pokemon (especially if you have to do 6) for every one of the HUNDREDS to possibly THOUSANDS of battles I'll go through in the entire game? As if that wasn't annoying and tedious enough, the fact that the XP is divided among each Pokemon that was out means that you have to get in even MORE battles than you otherwise would if they didn't divide it up.
immortalfrieza said:
5. Pokemon battles especially against the computer need to become much more engaging and not repetitive.
Ketsuban said:
I agree (sort of)! Gym leader battles have improved to an extent - less of them are about "have type advantage, sweep" than before - but it'd be nice to have some more battles on the level of Whitney or Elesa, with simple but effective strategies which can wreck you if you don't plan ahead.
Yeah, but ALL trainers in an area, if not individually, should have a variety of types of Pokemon, not solely ones that appear in the area. Also, the A.I. of battles in general should improve, I've gone in and out of battles all the time without hardly a scratch because the A.I. keeps using useless moves against me. They should have some kind of Pokemon type checking program in the computer that sees what type of Pokemon you have and uses moves and withdraws and sends out Pokemon that are useful against that type accordingly. Also, they should remove all those buffing, debuffing, and other moves that basically do nothing, at least when the computer uses them because you'll probably take them out in one or two turns anyway.
immortalfrieza said:
They need to finally remove the turn based combat, which only required the player to know how to press the A button repeatedly, and change it to a action RPG, like Kingdom hearts or the Tales series, which even during really easy fights require you to pay attention.
Ketsuban said:
Pokémon is defined by its turn-based combat, removing it would be taking one of the defining characteristics of the series away.
First, Pokemon is NOT defined by it's combat, it's every turn-based combat system that was ever made with types added in to make it LOOK like it's different when it really isn't. There isn't anything unique about the type system either, it's just the old Fire/Ice/Lightning/Water elemental system that has been around forever with a few more types added in. The only difference here is that instead of the elements being exclusive only to your enemies and you if you're wearing special equipment, they FORCE these elemental weaknesses and strengths on you.
If turn-based combat truly is the defining feature of Pokemon, then they need to take the turn-based combat more worthwhile and that you need to pay actual attention to even if you're overleveled. A good example would be the RPGs that have a turn-based combat system that if you're attacking you can press A or whatever with timing and do more damage, and block or dodge attacks against you to reduce or even avoid entirely with timing. This is about as interesting as I've experienced with turn-based combat, and when this kind of thing is absent only the battle music makes turn-based combat exciting, and Pokemon has only had exciting music in the first generation and the gamecube games.
immortalfrieza said:
6. Capturing of Pokemon should NOT be insanely tedious, the biggest problem here being that for no reason whatsoever Pokemon that faint cannot be captured, despite the fact that it would be much easier to do that way and that it happens in the Anime.
Ketsuban said:
I don't give three shakes of a pigeon's arse what the anime does, the anime sucks. Fainting a Pokémon stops you from catching it so you actually have to put effort into catching Pokémon. (Hint: Absol, Girafarig and Watchog can learn Mean Look and Baton Pass, and Breloom can learn Spore and False Swipe. If that's too hard, download Pokegen and make a Wonder Guard Spiritomb with Mean Look, Spore and False Swipe.)
I'm aware of these abilites designed largely for capturing, and they help the issue, but they're neither common to most Pokemon or useful against all Pokemon. Most of the hard-to-find Pokemon are resistent or immune to these attacks, and they're the ones that you actually need to use them on. Oh, and I just mentioned the Anime because it doesn't make any sense that they would do it there but not in the game, and even if the Anime didn't exist it still wouldn't make sense. The Anime is just boring for the same reason that the games are boring, they've never changed, but at least the Anime TRIES to make each episode look different, the Color games just add in new maps and new Pokemon and call it different when it really isn't.
immortalfrieza said:
Also, I know that rare Pokemon should be in there, but does that mean that I have to take out 100 small fry JUST to find that one Pokemon?!? Simple fix here, just have a system which would cause the odds of finding a rare Pokemon in an particular area to increase the more common ones you took out, eventually becoming all but certain.
Ketsuban said:
I disagree with your justification (fighting small fry waiting for the one you want to appear gives you an excuse to grind or trade with friends) but I like your solution because it makes the game more accessible.
Grinding is rarely necessary in Pokemon, at least for the main game and as of yet, and lately they've been doing the tower of trainers that you can fight over and over for that.
immortalfrieza said:
7. Unless it's an extremely rare or story event Pokemon, you should be able to choose ANY Pokemon from that game's roster as your starter. I can't tell you how annoying it is to want a particular Pokemon at the start, but not be able to get it until almost the end of the game.
It'd be nice to drop the required grass-water-fire trio, but I imagine it does make the game difficult to balance around (you just know some joker will decide he wants to start with Deino and then complain that the game isn't giving him enough experience and he has to grind too much). If you really want to have a nonstandard starter, I say trade with a friend.
Of course you can just "trade with a friend" to get some rare Pokemon early, but you could also get some Ultimate Pokemon at the start and speed through the game too. There are numerous ways trading can be used to help the Pokemon series' problems but the Pokemon games should be able to stand on their own and have far more than just trading with friends be it's sole redeeming value. I'm also aware that some Pokemon would be either too useless (just make them more useful) or have too steep XP requirements (which is an easy problem to solve, they could just lower it, but solely for starter Pokemon and only if they're not traded), but at least there should be a fairly large number of Pokemon available as starters of every type and/or mixed types.
immortalfrieza said:
8. Evolution should be forcable to ALL Pokemon, as well as via level, so that people that just want to evolve a Pokemon could just do so without having to spend hours leveling it up, and if they were actually going to use it, they would be rewarded with much higher overall stats.
I can maybe see this working. Certainly it'd deal with peoples' alarm over the fact they're riding on the back of a six-inch-tall pigeon. I might want to limit it to the postgame though.
Putting it in the postgame is acceptable since that's probably when most people put any real effort into getting all the Pokemon anyway.
immortalfrieza said:
9. Finally, one of the most important, stop releasing 2 games and eventually a third every generation. It wouldn't have to be easy to do, but there should only be 1 version where all the Pokemon from that generation could be caught in one game.
Ketsuban said:
You're supposed to trade with people and make friends. You can trade over the Internet now, your excuse about link cables is worthless.
Your second sentence pretty much invalidated the first one, on the internet you're probably not trading with people but with online avatars that you're probably not going to develop a meaningful relationship with and are probably just people that mass produce Pokemon for trading anyway, so no making of friends is necessary anymore and shouldn't have been to begin with. The multiple games every generation is just a cheap tactic from gamefreak because they couldn't be bothered to release 3 completely different games each with different Pokemon to trade between so they instead they give us the same game 3 times with slightly different Pokemon.
Jordi said:
I agree that it would be nice if they could provide some incentive to use more than a few Pokemon.
Ketsuban said:
Here's your incentive: "I think that Pokémon looks cool". You now have a justification for using pretty much anything in the game.
Really? You call that an incentive? How something looks is an extremely superficial reason to do anything, which is probably the main reason that Pokemon is marketed solely to kids because they are the only ones that would fall for such an approach. That's also ignoring the issue since you'd just use one or two, not your entire team
immortalfrieza said:
Things that never change (for the better obviously) die, people and francises alike.
Ketsuban said:
Pokémon has changed. Aside from the increasing number and variety of Pokémon, you've got Dark and Steel types (added in Gen II), held items (Gen II), natures (Gen III), EVs (added Gen III as an improvement over Gen I's worthless Stat Exp.), weather (Gen III), the physical/special split (added Gen IV, prior to which e.g. all Fire moves were special and all Fighting moves were physical), entry hazards (introduced Gen II, rose to prominence Gen IV)... the list goes on.
Not really, those things you mentioned are just minor tweaks instead of overhauls and most of them are also either imperceptable or no brainer things that should have been in the first generation of games to begin with.
