rickleone

Playing Pokemon is a waste of time

Added 2022-08-12 17:41:02 +0000 UTC

Last Wednesday I noticed that a new Pokemon trailer dropped. Mostly by the wave of lewd fanart on my Twitter feed. So I opened a Youtube tab and searched for it.
My expectations were pretty low, the usual critters idling at 6 FPS with their stupefied painted faces and sprawling wastelands with an origami tree put here and there.
But, oh boy, Game Freak is professionally committed to making each new game more unprofessional than the previous, and icing it with just enough fan service to let the vast majority of potential customers forget that they're buying for 60+ bucks games that could run on a PS2.
What I'm talking about?

The aforementioned low FPS of the pokemon, the fact that landscapes are barren steppe made with a bunch of generic assets, where the objects made by GF stick out like a sore thumb.
The fact that they won't have any voice acting despite the trailers featuring i, because it's the standard of the industry now. Tragicomic.
The apparent step back after Arceus to un-animated battles where pokemon never touch, but throw emojis at each other.
The increasingly creepy human designs, which look less and less like pokemon characters and can't handle facial expressions and mouth flaps.
Another ultimate move that will become the new coat of paint for a battle system that for the last 9 years gravitated around an auto-win button.

Koraidon, what have they done to you?

This is the first time I can say with no doubt that the pokemon themselves suck. I've always been pretty neutral on the argument, because there's almost always a strong study behind each pokemon, and every one has its fans, even Vanillite.
(Personally, I find all the anthropomorphic pokemon very uncanny and out of place, and I know that they're the absolute fan favorites.)
But this time, giving wheels to a legendary but making him still move on its legs like it's the Flinstones' Mobile is embarrassing.
How does it happen? How in the thick and reiterated process of creature creation at GF, does a dragon with giant hernias coming out of his butt get approval?

Originality at any cost.

My theory is that The Pokemon Company operates on a dysfunctional balance between expected and unexpected.
The expected is what is ideal for marketing and cutting costs.

For marketing, is very good to give a new ultimate form to the Kanto pokemon every generation, especially to Pikachu and Charizard. Or making the three starters three anthros because you literally cut the middle man in the free marketing tool that is Rule-34.
For cutting costs, is especially convenient to not give actual battle animations to the pokemon. Punches, kicks, correct spawn points for the beams, etc. Also, 1v1 battles, that are the 95% trainer encounters you will make in the single player. It has been that way with grayscale sprites on the Game Boy and it will always be.

The unexpected is about making things different from what fans and artists have been envisioning for years, just to demonstrate that the "professionals" at Game Freak aren't copying the "amateurs" on the internet. Making them different at any cost.
I've already mentioned the hernia dragon, but a bunch of things that come to my mind right now is:

A regional evolution for Farfetch'd that looks like a western knight because fakemon Samurai Farfetch'd was already too popular. (Or even Maitresse Farfetch'd from the Space World Demo of Pokemon Gold.)
The absence of any new Eevolution, because the internet is already full of Dragon, Ghost, and Flying Eevees. The last time a new Eevolution was introduced, it was designed around a new type that fans didn't know about.
We will never see a Sound type despite so many moves pokemon being already themed around sound and music.
A new Grass/Rock pokemon that would look cool, make sense and have both interesting vulnerabilities and perks? Easier to find them in a Rom Hack.
Making Kangaskhan's cub a pre-evolution with its own name? Oh, that would mean questioning the breeding system where dogs and mice lay eggs. It just won't happen.

Breeding and Metagame

The breeding system is especially interesting, not just for the eugenics implications (these are games made in Japan after all) but because it was introduced in Gold and Silver as a trick to make kids with no better alternative to play a bit longer. You make pokemon mate, the eggs hatch, and you get new species, better stats, and egg moves.
But today it's a system so exploited that "exploited" is the norm and every pokemon with half a chance to make it in the competitive game has to descend from a respectable line of inbreeding that the player has spent days laying down.
Or better, it would if most of the competitive players didn't create their super-pokemon in third-party editors. A choice that I completely approve of, because there's no strategy and skills in running around the Daycare Center with your bike and hoping for the best fruit of incest to hatch from the egg. Just luck and a lot of time to waste.
At this point, I just wish for the IVs and EVs to get removed from the game, and make all pokemon of the same species equal, with only natures, abilities, and items to tweak their potential usage in battle.
It's a system so deeply broken that just doesn't make sense anymore to be around.
But instead, the new ultimate move introduced with this generation, the terrifyingly ugly Tera-Crystal seems like it will make the obtainment of super pokemon with a very favorable Tera-Type even more relevant.
We're still in the realm of leaks and speculations, but in the last pokemon trailer a Dragonite with a Fire Tera-Type takes a water move from a Slowbro, and the sound font of the supereffective attack can be heard, meaning that the Dragon Type of Dragonite has been completely ignored.
That would mean that Tera-Types might be used to make a lot of already very powerful pokemon, Gastrodon, Garchomp, Ferrotorn, and so on, free of their infamous 4× vulnerabilities that prevented them from monopolizing the metagame.
If a Snorlax can be of 18 different types, countering it becomes more a matter of luck than strategy.

It's still a GB game

The battle system of Pokemon is so susceptible to ultimate moves, not just because they're brocken, but also because it hasn't been changed that much in the past 25 years: 1v1 is still the norm, and most of the pokemon can be 1HKO-ed from a supereffective attack, 70% of the moves are trash and 3 levels of difference are matter of life or death.
This was functional for the GB games, which had to deal with crippling hardware limitations, and had to simplify the basic mechanics of JRPGs: elements, classes, and attributes compressed in the same layer of the Type chart, 1v1 as the exclusive way to battle, and a steep layer-stats curve that made easy fights quicker and less tedious.
But there's no excuse today to keep this very idiosyncratic type of battle system, especially considering that some parts have been updated. Pokemon not being a casual encounter anymore, decent moves available in the early levels, and experience points spread across the entire team. These upgrades in the quality of life and game feel have just annihilated the difficulty for a battle system still based on slow and painstaking grinding, and the ultimate moves have been the biggest source of alteration because there's no other metagame like pokemon so critically centered around the chance of using correctly the ultimate move at the player's disposal.
For sure, the Tera-Crystals might toss around a bit more this very flimsy more-exceptions-than-rules battle system, but will make very nice (?) figures for kids to collect and remember that time they pushed the autowin button.

You've been imprinted as a child.

And between these figures there will be an exclusive form for Charizard, I bet on that, because it's that kind of fanservice that makes people forget that they don't actually enjoy Pokemon games.
The other side of fanservice is instead giving players a lot of Rule-34 baits to thirst over. It might be Professor Turus with his soulless eyes and mechanical mouthflap, or actual anthro Incineroar.
Not against putting hot characters in a game for kids, but at this point it seems more a corporate decision to leverage the fandom for free publicity through horny fanart, than an artistic choice.
Especially considering how weird the anatomy of most of the poke-furries is (skinny, no joints, long torso, giant head, etc.) and how better they would look as quadrupeds instead of bipeds that can't go full anthro because "game for kids."
It's just cringy to have Rule-34 work half-done for us. When I saw the Grass-Type Gym Leader of Sword&Shield with those giant boobs but childish facial features, I gained a new wrinkle.
It's like Game Freak is whispering to their adult fans: "Hey, we can't make games for grown-ups because we don't care anymore, but here's something for you."

It's just boring

To reiterate, when you take away the fanservice, playing pokemon isn't fun anymore, and to demonstrate that is the existence of games that mimick pokemon, Coromon, Nexomon, TemTem and lost relevance the week after they were published.
They can do what pokemon do ten times better, with all the adjustments in the story, quality of life, and graphics they want, but the sad reality is that playing Pokemon feels fun because we have the pokemon, creatures of the biggest media franchise of modern times, but in reality, we're still playing a GB game decades behind its competitors, competitors that have to make good games because they aren't backed up by a fucking empire of card games, smartphone apps, anime, and most of all, merchandise.
Pokemon doesn't renovate because there's no time (one game per year, eh) nor incentive to do that. Because when you have such a vast and nostalgic fandom you need just to make the right amount of fanservice without giving the impression that you took inspiration from the fans themselves and let the hive mind of fan artists do the marketing for you.
It's just more effective. I daresay, supereffective.

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