Gaming

Look I'm drunk I don't understand what you're talking about. I live in Japan, but pokemon has always been a mystery to me. There's the Pikachu, there's pokemon Go. It's just a game. I also don't understand this Lemmy business, I'm trying

Gamefreak clearly isn't interested in evolving their formula very much. Each game is designed to be approachable for young children who are potentially playing Pokemon for the first time. So yeah, there is a lot of hand holding.

I've found myself hoping the same thing though, that maybe the franchise would grow up with me, but it doesn't look like it is going to happen. I expect that we'll have to mash the A button through the Pokemon catching tutorial until the end of time.

When I was a kid I was super into pokemon. I loved playing the games and they stood out to me for one reason: they were challenging. My first game was Black, and I got stuck on the first gym leader for a few days, but when I figured it out it was immensely satisfying. I would hit roadblock, I would struggle, and eventually I overcame it. Then my friend introduced me to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and it got even harder. I honestly think that the final dungeon of Explorers of Time made me smarter or something. It forced my dumbass child brain to think outside the box and find solutions on my own.

Then Pokemon X and Y released, and it was the most stupidly easy game ive ever played. And it kept getting easier after that. Add onto that the worsening quality and I stopped caring about Pokemon. My friend who is really into Pokemon hasnt bought a new game in years, he only plays Romhacks or replays the old games.

This is what Temtem and Nexomon are for.

I think modern games in general hold your hand too much. Some small level of hand holding/tutorial is fine, but so many take it way too far. I've gotten bored of a lot of games before they actually started because of that.

I have heard very positive reviews of Casette Beasts, which appears to cater to the Pokemon crowd. I’m not so much into that genre, but has anyone else tried it? It’s on Game Pass as well.

Honestly I wonder what was appealing about pokemon games when I was a child. They have boring gameplay and every single game is the exact same.

I'm right there with you. I've been around since red/blue on the GameBoy, but I started seriously playing when my kid got into it with black/white. We played every generations together since then. We're really burned out with Scarlet/Violet. The throwaway gimmicks, the hand holding, the lousy graphics, the glitchy multiplayer, it's painful because of the memories associated with Pokemon. We keep hoping they up their game only to be disappointed at release. Probably should just let go at this point.

Pokemon Legends Arceus was a real breath of fresh air, but it doesn't seem like GF wants to learn anything from it. Repeating something I saw on Reddit: Pokemon deserves better developers

Man I was more bummed about the fact that the newest games don't let you change out of that god awful school uniform, or at least change the colors...

I think issue is Pokémon games are still made primarily for children with age between 6 to 12. There are a lot of older people who grow up with it and some of them righteous feel like they are left behind.

While on one hand I completely and totally agree that the games seem to always ignore the seasoned vets of the series. It’s also been very clear that their design choice is to always assume this is your first Pokémon and that you ARE a child since that’s the target audience always. So the hand holding is always a result of that design choice, now obviously there’s better ways to go about it, Pokémon is the only game that treats me like a child for the first 4 hours but then opens the system up and leaves me alone. But I also think it’s been getting better, look at the 3DS generation of games, those things were relentless with its constant “hey look over here and do this!” That it took a lot for me to finish those games.

I'm afraid that puts too much work on GameFreak so it's not possible. I wish another dev got rights to make a mainline Pokemon game.

For me, Pokemon has become more about romhacks/fangames than official releases. I still love the property, but the product Nintendo is providing at this point just isn't something I'm all that interested in.

...although credit where credit is due, Legends Arceus and Scarlett/Violet did attempt to innovate with the open world stuff. The results of that were also...not for me, but credit there.

Thread reminds me that I need to finish Pokemon Unbound. I have a bad tendency to start new hacks before finishing the ones I started haha.

I think I'd be cool with this if we could just get difficulty levels man :/

Pokemon is still so much fun, but they really took away the process of getting lost and figuring your way around things.

Some quality of life improvements are great, some aren't. It would be nice to have a tutorial/experienced mode for it just to cut out some of the fluff

Yeah, Pokemon in general is just far too easy. Either just go with the Kaizo hacks or play SMT. For me I just play SMT now. Similar enough and the difficulty is just perfect. Also Pokemon's story sucks ass. Never once been interested in any of their plots. Team Magma/Aqua was okay but pretty much make my own stories for it.

It seems like such an obvious quality of life improvement to introduce a difficulty-like mechanic that asks the user if they are familiar with the series. That way, there could be two tracks to the start of the game: the standard hold-your-hand tutorial for newbies and children, and the streamlined version that skips a lot of the dialogue that explains what pokeballs are or whatnot. While I thought Scarlet/Violet wasn’t the worst offender of some of the recent series, this series HAS been going for decades now and I’d like to see them reflect this in their intended audiences. There is a large child fanbase but there is also a large amount of adults who play after having grown up with the games.

Yeah, I was kind of enjoying it at first. I think I got 15 or 20 hours in before I just put it down and never came back to it. Not intentionally, I just never felt like it. That's saying something, because I wasn't that impressed with Sw/Sh either, but I 100%ed Sword.

They absolutely hold your hand too much. I wish Nintendo could make a Pokémon game instead of The Pokémon Company. I feel like Nintendo's first-party team would make something stellar with more of a challenge (without being unfair), a more engaging story, fun puzzles, a more curated world to explore, better graphics, and maybe even add something actually new to the series.

I just finished playing through Pokemon Infinite Fusion and had a great time. I played on hard difficulty and it was a good challenge. Lots of content with a fun central mechanic. I also played it on my Steam Deck so I got the handheld experience. It was a little buggy at times(though I guess that is expected with pokemon now 🙃)

I want games like the past, with almost no tutorials at all. Give me pokemon red, yellow where the prof is like, heres a pokemon, a pokedex, and some old guy will teach you to catch a pokemon next door. BOOM, pokemon expert.

It feels like Gamefreak has really struggled to appeal to the various different sets of fans post Gen 5, I wonder how much of the hand holding and other issues are a reaction to the backlash gen 5 sadly got.

I've played both PLA and SV and my impression from both was that the tutorial dragged on for way too long. Even as a new player, that shit should not be lasting for over an hour. Also way too many text boxes that don't change anything based on what you pick. Just let me play the game please.

@worfamerryman This is how all modern Nintendo games seem to me. Playing Tears of the Kingdom and every character has to explain some game concept to me in the middle of their dialog. It's super clunky and repetitive.