It will be interesting to look back on this thread in 5+ years and see if opinions change. Especially concerning the designs of Pokémon.
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I guess it’s fair to say they’ve gotten worse in your opinion, but there is no objective measure to make that call. If you think Gen 1 sets the standard, then Gen 2 already breaks the mold and so on and so forth. And movies are an entirely different medium and certainly more complex than Pokémon designs.
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Ah ok, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!
Greetz,
Quuador
I can’t agree with any argument that says regional dex design as a whole is sub-par for any gen pre-Gen 6, and even then I like all the regional dexes through Gen 8. I don’t think any dex is worse than any other - each generation has a majority of middle-of-the-road ‘mons with its share of great and subpar designs. I do think this new regional dex though is overall completely lacking, the designs are either bad or decent with only a few standouts. But if Gen 1 is the standard, then this Gen would be below average.
I should have specified like a pokemons colors just being 2 colors with one being yellow and zigzag, and with that being like the main aspect of the design, feels lazy.
I mean comparing pikachu to this, the latter just feels uninspired and uninteresting, even when I get what they’re going for.
This pokemons design falls on the uninteresting scale of bad for new pokemon which is more excusable.
And yes jynx is a bad design, everyone knows that. In gen one, I find a couple of designs I dont like out of 150. In the new game, I find a couple of designs I actually like compared to the rest. And Im only talking about new original pokemon designs and not regional variants which is just relying on older designs to be good.
And this has been an on going process. Each generation since gen 3 has had a gradual decrease in overall quality. I like gen one/gen two’s pokedex more than gen 3, and emerald was the first game I actually played so its not a nostalgia thing. Every generation has some duds and some amazing designs, scarlet and violet is no exception. But the ratio of good to bad has been sliding towards bad slowly throughout the generations.
And lastly, the starters are staples to represent your generation. You want them to be solid designs that really sell the game. And Id like to find anyone that defends this horrid abomination of a ‘pokemon’ as being actually well designed.
A ton of handholding in the beginning id really like to see pokemon move away from down the road. The excuse of “well its for the kids” is not enough, a large majority of the fanbase has played atleast one pokemon game before… they know the ropes.
OR
Make the introductory phase completely optional… like A or B, go through it or skip it entirely. I get seriously discouraged when im mashing A and have had 6 battles in 3.5 hours.
I turned the “skip cutscene” option on in the settings but that seemed to have done nothing.
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Totally agree with this. I’m almost finished the game now and the only cut scenes I thought worthwhile were the ones between Arven and his Mabosstiff. Those suprisingly got me in the feels pretty hard.
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Not including all Pokemon in a game is bad enough as someone who likes catching em all, but not even having all gen 1’s? the disrespect… Maybe I’m just old.
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The Arven and Mabosstiff subplot is gutwrenching and is easily one of the best storylines Pokemon has ever come up with.
They BETTER have an Arven’s Mabosstiff Character Rare card with the Mabosstiff playing with a Poke Ball in one of the Scarlet/Violet sets!
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Just got to the Pokemon League, but haven’t gone in yet. Thought I would share my team. This is easily one of the most fun teams I’ve used in game.
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At the risk of diverging from the original intent of this thread, I’d be interested in hearing this community’s take on the Game Freak/Nintendo relationship, the expected development cycle, and how far behind other AAA devs Game Freak falls in this respect.
My impressions of Violet after about 3 hours playing (I’m limited in my gaming time due to a 4 month old daughter lol) is similar to the above - super fun gameplay loop, mixed bag on new 'mon design, great QOL improvements but all are overshadowed by the horrible performance and graphical quality. It’s jarring seeing people and pokemon pop in, stutter, and lag constantly, have creatures and environment pieces clip in and out, and deal with obnoxious framerate dips.
The game just feels woefully unfinished. One critic review I read (forget which) summed it up perfectly: it feels like Game Freak is incrementally building towards something transcendent with this open world concept but they’re not there yet. Began with SwSh, continued with Arceus, and now with S/V. But each time there’s things left out. Graphical fidelity lacking, lifeless environments, weak story, or overlooked elements of core pokemon gameplay that need to be re-evaluated in an open world context. E.g. dynamic level scaling. If I can freely take my level 12 team to an area where I black out to level 50 mon, where’s the joy in open world exploration? Same is true for the opposite, I don’t take joy in repeatedly stomping trainers and gym leaders with an OP team.
I will still play the game through to completion because I’m a huge fan of the gameplay and series but boy do Nintendo and Game Freak need to work some stuff out. Take the time to deliver a finished product, listen to player feedback, etc.
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I think many of your criticisms are shared. Charlie from YouTube had a similar take.
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I just recently watched a friend restart his Alpha Sapphire. Second route you get access to and he already has a super trained, Quiet nature, Mischievous 252 sp atk Lotad with Giga Drain from the DexNav. I told him he should get himself a Nosepass as his second poke at least to make the game a bit challenging. 
They really should implement a proper, well thought-out hard mode.
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Definitely some interesting new abilities in this game, too. Curious to hear what you think about the competitive viability of Earth Eater Orthworm? Not only immune to Ground, but recovers a fourth of its HP when hit by a Ground-type move. Base 145 Defense, decent 85 Attack. Rest of its stats pretty poor, but that ability is interesting for a Steel type, to say the least.
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An enormous amount of new abilities, they really went all out.
Orthworm appears to be pretty solid, much better than you’d think looking at that derpy face. Shed tail with Sitrus berry, access to rocks, great ability, Body Press, surprisingly fast. Good stuff. I can’t imagine it won’t fill some role, even if used sparingly.
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I’m about 10 hours in. The game is rough. As everyone knows, there is no polish to this game. The priority is clearly to publish a new game on a consistent time above all else.
I fully agree with this. It just feels like since XY (arguable), I’ve just been playing these intermediate games between a 2D pokemon experience and a 3D open world where they will end up. It’s like playing a beta version of a really good game that won’t exist for another one or two generations.
Aside from the jank unpolished aspects, which normally I could ignore but are particularly egregious in this game, I think there’s a deeper issue with the game. First, I will say that no matter how bad a Pokemon game is there will always be an element of fun. The game is built off the same battle system and mechanics since basically 1996 so it’s a proven model. The problem I have with this game is that if you remove the 1996 battle mechanic, the game is just a sandwich making simulator. Despite being an open-world game, there is virtually no game mechanics that USE the open-world aspect.
To demonstrate this, compare the game to Arceus which I actually thought was a really decent and fun game. Collecting herbs and things is removed. Crafting system is removed. The great level-scaling was removed. Wisps are removed or at least kind of replaced with the unsatisfying coin gremlin thing. Sidequests are removed (or severely minimized, I have yet to see one). Alpha pokemon were great “rewards” for exploring and also offered a bit of a challenge but they were removed and not really replaced with anything. And here’s the most important one: the variety of options on how to interact with a pokemon are removed. In Arceus, you could battle to weaken, sneak up on them, stun them, feed them, catch them from afar, catch them from up close. And the pokedex offered an incentive system for trying different techniques. In ScVi, basically you’re limited to STOPPING your exploration (even if you accidentally touch a pokemon spawned BELOW THE GROUND LOL) and then engaging in a battle system built in 1996. The pace of the exploration and the pace of the battle system just doesn’t work and it goes back to the game feeling like a beta version of a better open world game. The funny thing is that Arceus actually did a great job with this, simply by letting you literally run away from a battle if you didn’t want to engage.
Overall, the game just feels like 3 steps backwards from Arceus, which even Arceus had it’s faults. And again, it feels like it comes down to just not enough time being given to development and fleshing out more than just an extremely basic set of mechanics.
The game was extremely hard to play at first. The towns are torture to visit and it’s all (attempted) eye-candy with literally nothing to do in them other than fight a gym leader and buy sandwich materials. I like the other two plotlines more so far. I think the non-linear concept is a HUGE plus to the game but at the same time it also is a bit deceiving because realistically, everyone will run though the game in mostly the same order. The removal of the extreme hand-holding and linearity that was present in SWSH is big improvement.
Starting off, the game was sitting at a 4/10 for me. Now that I’m actually getting to the core gameplay and the movement options increase (and there is a lot less jank outside the towns and cities, where you are forced to start in), I’d probably bump it to 6/10. It’s a half-way complete open world game that doesn’t really reward exploring or offer any open world mechanics and instead forces you to play the same way you have since 1996.
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What really gets to me, is I wish they would include ALL the older Pokemon in these games. I may not enjoy or appreciate any Pokemon past the first couple gens (to each their own), but if I could at least catch ALL the first two gens in a modern Pokemon game, that would be great and probably sell me on a title (except for this one, there is no amount of patches in the world that can fix this game).
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Its undeniable Gamefreak is unable to keep up with the release schedule TPCi forces them to follow. It could be because of crunch or Gamefreak’s inability to develop 3D games, but I think it’s a mixture of both. Additionally, GF’s game design philosophy post-Gen 5 doesn’t help, either. BW sold the least amount of copies out of any new-Gen main series title, and BW2 sold the least amount of copies out of any “third”/sequel main series game, despite the latter widely considered some of if not the best games in the series next to Platinum and Emerald. GF and TPCi have a history of shoddy PR and dismissal of fan criticism to their detriment. They saw poor sales and pivoted from innovating and improving each generation to cutting corners and nostalgia bait mid-development for XY. Just look at the obvious Kanto favoritism. XY was the point Pokemon stopped SOLELY marketing towards children - however, for PR and business purposes, Pokemon is nothing more than a kids video game (gotta convince little Timmy’s parents to buy it for him for Christmas).
In ORAS, the Battle Tower doesn’t exist - instead, there’s a sign that reads it’s “coming soon”. In Sun & Moon, there are actual unfinished buildings with construction cones and debris scattered about because they couldn’t be finished in development time (either that, or it’s a weird attempt at world-building lore). The Lets GO games were purposefully made easy and short because GF believes children today spend much less time playing individual games than they did 20 years ago. SwSh ended up the way they were because Gamefreak originally believed the Switch as a console would fail, and didn’t take the time to learn how to develop games for it before being forced by TPCi to create an entire new generation…in fact, so many elements of SwSh would indicate it was originally planned to be a smartphone game. There’s documentation on it but ultimately, it’s all just speculation with a minute, albeit non-zero chance of truth.
To circle back around to the Gen 5 sales point from earlier, TPCi and the devs at Gamefreak clearly prioritize sales over a unique experience. Now that sales have been trending upward since Gen 5 and only increase with each successive generation, why would they detour from their current trajectory? SV had the highest amount of pre-orders for any mainline Pokemon release. Unless there’s a significant dropoff in sales post-day/week one, I don’t think TPCi will allow GF to alter their schedule even if they wanted to. They are probably already developing Gen 10, while working on DLC for the current generation and whatever filler game they plan on releasing 2 years from now. They can’t handle it, but they either crunch and deliver the bare minimum or lose their baby.
It’s truly starting to appear the games are simply a vessel for TPCi to market and advertise merchandise through by introducing fans to the Pokemon/trainers in an inexpensive way, seeing what is liked/what isn’t and then selling/pushing that merch. The franchise doesn’t profit directly from the games all that much, but it needs the games to survive. As long as the games release and consumers consume, no matter how terrible the experience, the cycle will continue one way or another.
Also, slightly back on topic, if anyone has been keeping up with the leaks for SV, the development cycle for this game was so rushed they actually removed planned content from the base game to save for the DLC. Maybe this was the case for the SwSh DLC too, but if it was they left no trace of what would have been cut content in the base game. With SV they developed a few specific Pokemon, then retroactively removed them from the game only to lock them behind a paywall at a later date. I think DLC is fine as a concept, but what bothers me is removing content already made from the release version of the game so you can charge money for it later instead of developing something entirely new.
Thoughts are all over the place here. But Gamefreak really needs more staff, more development partners, more experts, more funding and much more time in between releases. No questions, all of the above.
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I enjoy the game a lot and instead of progressing I’m doing quite slowly because every time I enter a new location I just want to explore. However on the technical side the game is so unfinished it’s embarrassing. Why doesn’t GameFreak as for help if they suck at programming? The peak was when you go and introduce yourself at the academy and you see all the other students sitting at class moving their legs in a laggy way like 
those weren’t even long distance!
Graphics are not the most important thing to enjoy the game but at this point I thought we’d get something better. You’d think the Pokemon Company would notice the judgement Sword & Shield got… I guess they don’t care as long as they make money.
Some people say the game would perform better on better hardware but I’d say it’s not a Switch issue, but a GameFreak issue…
Oh and I dislike most of the new Pokemon unfortunately. There are a few good ones but the rest I just don’t care about. Thankfully a lot of old mons are returning
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If you exclude the graphic issues, SV is hands down one of the best pokemon games for me. The flexible triple storyline/quests beats the typical set gym + raiding team bad’s base formula. Really enjoyed exploring the areas and the pokemon catching. And holy smokes the music is top notch, looking at you Team star boss battle theme.
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