(Little) Things that annoy you in Pokémon

It's annoying that you can't use restricted and Mythical legendaries in a Battle Frontier sort of place. Like in every post game area they've been banned and pretty much relegated to being trophy Pokemon. If they ever bring back the BF hopefully they have a facility for those Pokemon.

Also emptying boxes of junk Pokemon after Wonder Trading breedjects is just tiresome. There should be a way to just purge an entire box.
 

Xen

is a Community Leaderis a Top Social Media Contributor Alumnus
Wi-Fi Leader
It's annoying that you can't use restricted and Mythical legendaries in a Battle Frontier sort of place. Like in every post game area they've been banned and pretty much relegated to being trophy Pokemon. If they ever bring back the BF hopefully they have a facility for those Pokemon.
It's ok, we still have Phione. Oh wait.....

Honestly it wouldn't be too hard to implement a facility that doesn't carry any Pokemon restrictions but scales the levels of the Pokemon akin to Showdown's random battle circuit. Not only would that enable us to use mascot and mythical legendaries and still have a challenging post-game facility, but it would also let us use lower-tier/unevolved Pokemon in a fair setting should a player choose to do so.

But alas, Game Freak seems to have developed a phobia of the Battle Frontier as of late, which is pretty annoying considering Pokemon hasn't had a decent post-game for two generations now.
 
It's ok, we still have Phione. Oh wait.....

Honestly it wouldn't be too hard to implement a facility that doesn't carry any Pokemon restrictions but scales the levels of the Pokemon akin to Showdown's random battle circuit. Not only would that enable us to use mascot and mythical legendaries and still have a challenging post-game facility, but it would also let us use lower-tier/unevolved Pokemon in a fair setting should a player choose to do so.

But alas, Game Freak seems to have developed a phobia of the Battle Frontier as of late, which is pretty annoying considering Pokemon hasn't had a decent post-game for two generations now.
TBH the only thing that bugs me about post game battle arenas like the Frontier, Maison, and/or Tree is that I can't get all the ribbons on legendary/mythic Pokemon. Pretty annoying for a completionist.

Also, #FreeCosmog4PostGameBattles :P.
 
It's annoying that you can't use restricted and Mythical legendaries in a Battle Frontier sort of place. Like in every post game area they've been banned and pretty much relegated to being trophy Pokemon. If they ever bring back the BF hopefully they have a facility for those Pokemon.
This is part of the reason I miss White Tree Hollow/Black Tower from Black2/White2, as it's the only facility I know of that allowed the use of restricted pokemon.

Gamefreak has been attempting to give legendaries/mythicals some purpose in the occasional Battle Spot seasons, but as these are temporary it largely means that, like you said, they are worthless trophies that you never really get to use.

So a facility that actually uses and gives a challenge for restricted pokemon is high on my wishlist.
 
;-; still can't use Cosmog on the Battle Spot... come on, what harm can Cosmog do?! I want to battle competitively with my Cosmog!!! :3
Well, it's a one-of-a-kind Pokemon. You don't want to mess up the nature or IVs and make a bad set :P

(I assume Game Freak's logic on bans relies solely on cover status and extreme lack of availability)
 
Well, it's a one-of-a-kind Pokemon. You don't want to mess up the nature or IVs and make a bad set :P

(I assume Game Freak's logic on bans relies solely on cover status and extreme lack of availability)
As well as being the "son" of the Prince of Water, Ultra Space, legendary. No, I don't care that you have horrible stats and movepool. You are the son of a legendary. On the banlist you go.
 
Replaying Moon, I can't help but get more and more annoyed by how small many areas are and feel. (And, really, if you step back and add up all the areas you travel through in the game, the region is tiny). The player's house, for example, is the only house in the Hau'oli Outskirts. This is presumably meant to represent a whole residential area, with more houses that just aren't seen, but, really, they couldn't have included another (even un-enterable) house or two in the area?

It's always been the case that cities and towns are supposed to be seen as representations of larger, more fleshed-out versions of themselves, but the discrepancy between the representation and what seemingly is supposed to be there has clearly expanded with the transition into 3D. Each building, etc., has to take up more space, so you see fewer of them. In a sense, you sacrifice a better (or at least more effective) representation of the broader areas for better representations of individual things within them. A related problem that's at least as important is that the increasingly realistic depiction of things in the world makes the unrealistic aspects of the in-game world more apparent. (I wonder if there's a term for this phenomenon.) In, say, HGSS, it's much easier to accept that the world is only a representation of the bigger, full version of itself, because you'd never mistake what you're seeing for the real thing. Through Gens VI and VII, that's less and less the case.
 
It's always been the case that cities and towns are supposed to be seen as representations of larger, more fleshed-out versions of themselves, but the discrepancy between the representation and what seemingly is supposed to be there has clearly expanded with the transition into 3D. Each building, etc., has to take up more space, so you see fewer of them. In a sense, you sacrifice a better (or at least more effective) representation of the broader areas for better representations of individual things within them. A related problem that's at least as important is that the increasingly realistic depiction of things in the world makes the unrealistic aspects of the in-game world more apparent. (I wonder if there's a term for this phenomenon.)
The uncanny valley of representation?
kinda how like the kinect is the uncanny valley of moving

 
The uncanny valley of representation?
kinda how like the kinect is the uncanny valley of moving
I didn't watch the video, but the uncanny valley, at least as I've ever heard it defined, refers to being creeped out or unsettled by depictions that too closely approach the real thing, which (obviously) isn't what I'm talking about.
 
watch the video then o3o (it's like less than 8 minutes) they kinda define it as a fundamental dissconect between how things should be... or something
they define it better than I do, hence why I linked it
 
Being an engineer, I find charts help:

While ascribing "realistic" traits generally makes something more appealing, there's this gigantic dip in appeal when something is almost realistic but just not quite. In this stage, if it were a little less or a little more realistic it would be appealing again. Unappealing doesn't always mean creepy, but because the horror genre uses this trope for great effect the uncanny valley is commonly associated with it.

What Rapti is trying to say is that for you the towns in earlier generations were more appealing for their small attempts at realism (like you said, your imagination filled in the blanks that there was a bigger city out there that we weren't seeing). But as the game grows to almost realistic but not quite (with more proportionate environments to the character model, and less isometric view) you are now more bothered by the flaws you used to ignore.

Because when you really examine it, Alola's starting town is at least on par with Pallet Town, which is about even with the majority of starting towns. I think B2W2 is the only place with a truly "bigger" hometown.

Pallet Town, FireRed/LeafGreen


Hau'oli City Outskirts. Technically much larger than Pallet as it includes a Pokemon Center, a school, and a few areas to catch wild pokemon.


But while this used to be acceptable to you, now that it's really close to realistic it's starting to bother you about how much it has left to go.

It's similar to how places that seemed huge to you when you were little, and the player in past games was tiny. But now the player is bigger and so even though the world is too it all seems smaller somehow.

Does that make sense?
 
Does that make sense?
Uhh yeah. It's a longer re-statement of exactly what I said, but thanks for chart...? The point here is that they should be mindful of this issue and, absent the willingness and capacity to expand certain areas to look like their full selves, at least make superficial additions like, say, unreachable buildings shown in the background to give areas the appearance of more depth.

(Apparently "uncanny valley" is used to refer to this phenomenon, but that definitely wasn't the original concept.)
 
They didn't do that?


Not that I don't understand your point, but I think Gamefreak knew what they were doing. They probably wanted to cut back on inaccessible areas the player couldn't go to so "what you see is what you get." They also wanted to capture the closeness of island communities by not portraying them as sprawling as Castelia. That's why your hometown isn't actually a hometown, but just a house in the country on the outskirts of a major city.

And personally I think the few cities do have quite a bit of depth, but it's more subtle about it. It's like comparing Majora's Mask to Twilight Princess, one is spatially bigger but the other has more depth. Alola was the first game I really felt like I was in a society where pokemon and people were working together, all games up to this point seemed to put them in different planes of reality (ala The World Ends With You). The cities are smaller and there's less of them, but the people living their seemed more real.

Routes on the other hand are a different story. Personally I feel that up until Poni Island they feel much shorter, and even on Poni Island it really only applies to that one area. You know which one.

It was a lot like Johto-routes in some regards. I've said this before but I've never hated and loved a region more than Alola.
 
They probably wanted to cut back on inaccessible areas the player couldn't go to so "what you see is what you get."
There's still areas that probably should have been accessible that weren't. The Power Plant like Gen 5's seems to be fully modeled, but once again, it's not accessible, though at least they aren't teasing us with a locked door again. Also, the resort golf range is a pretty large area that could easily have been made into an accessible area, which they didn't. Where's my golfing mini-game Game Freak! :P

Furthermore, there's a lot of empty water that should have been used. For an ocean region, we sure don't have a lot of accessible water.

I don't know about you, but Alola just feels like there's too much going on. I understand about the Island closeness theme, but everything feels so cramped such that it feels like when you go through the storyline, you do a lot of work to not get very far.
 

MZ

And now for something completely different
is a Site Content Manager Alumnusis a Top Team Rater Alumnusis a Social Media Contributor Alumnusis a Community Leader Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Top Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Top Contributor Alumnusis a Top Smogon Media Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnus
Perhaps the feeling of something missing comes from how lame a lot of extra areas are? Pokemon's rewarded exploration with some pretty cool stuff in the past, just look at the Castelia Sewers leading to the street gang with the Krookodile graffiti. Even XY had a ton of completely optional yet fully fleshed out stuff like the Lost Hotel and the entire route leading into Lumiose from Dendemille that you don't have to touch. It doesn't feel mildly rewarding to stray off the beaten path in SM unless you really want every Zygarde cell. There's the other altar that's postgame only, the garbage plant with one mildly cute story, the rocky beach area on the 4th island, the place past catching wimpod that's pretty much just to check off all trainers before the route boss, the huge bay leading off melemele meadow that's got almost nothing other than a cell and the chance to catch Bagon like come on. I don't wanna look this up but I think the moment that broke me was on the way to the Tapu Village. There's like 4 branching paths from this one central fountain place, hopefully you remember what I mean. Other than Tapu Village you have the choice to a. check out the desert that's mostly postgame or post-Nanu (why?) stuff other than the Psychium Z and mostly devoid of life b. head over to the mostly useless power plant or c. go to a little fishing cove... with pretty much nothing other than fishing. I mean, what kind of impression does that send when I can barely name any exploration that didn't end in one of the few non-npc given z-crystals or disappointment? And they do want you to explore, there's still a few useful rewards like the Flamethrower TM and some stuff is hidden by pretty small crawlspaces that require you keep a critical lookout, not to mention hitting all trainers for route bosses. Alola feels real, but it also feels boring as shit and whatever XY's faults Kalos is way more fun to just go exploring in hands down.
 

Codraroll

Cod Mod
is a Forum Moderatoris a Community Contributoris a Top Smogon Media Contributor
Moderator
So... we all know how Pokémon Sun and Moon have pretty much the worst conditions for grinding in recent memory (RSE were worse, I think - the rest had some form of area with repeatable high-level trainers or at least an Elite Four you could spam). They even removed the trainer Exp. bonus. Clearly, the designers thought that introducing a mechanic that only worked at lvl. 100 meant that players should have to work harder to get there. Or was it just a coincidental fluke of design? Did nobody think of the grinding? Hell yes, they did. And they probably laughed manically as they did, too.

Today, I found another tidbit that shows how committed they were to this cause. Training Pokémon up to level 100 was always a gruelling process, but this is alleviated with the famous item Lucky Egg. As we all know, this held item increases Exp. gain by 50 %. As late as in ORAS, this item could be found aplenty during the main story, by stealing them from wild Pelipper. In Sun and Moon, however, you only get one Lucky Egg, and it is postgame. Even if you can accept it coming painfully late, it still means you're limited to boosting one Pokémon's Exp. at a time. No Exp. Share abuse for you...

...but wait a minute! Pelipper isn't the Pokémon most commonly associated with the Lucky Egg! For as long as held items have existed, they can be found very rarely held by wild Chansey! In every game Chansey has appeared in since Gold and Silver, barring Pokémon XD, the Lucky Egg is one of two items Chansey can carry. Recent games that don't feature Chansey have wild Happiny instead (BW, ORAS), with the same 5 % chance of holding a Lucky Egg. And you know what? Sun and Moon feature both Happiny and Chansey!

But no. The designers specifically went in and removed the Lucky Egg from Happiny and Chansey in Sun and Moon. You may catch as many of them as you like, but none of them will ever hold a Lucky Egg. Those eggs induce happiness, both canonically and for the players, and feature heavily in Happiny's and Chansey's lore. However, these lovely Pokémon had their eggs stolen away from them by the designers. What kind of sick bustards would do such a thing?
 

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 1, Guests: 14)

Top