The problem with tedium is its mental and emotional depression. Why bother doing something innovative if Pokémon will remain #1 no matter the slo Pokémon produces and no matter how many competitors, whether indie or corporate, try? Even if you make the most innovative Mons game, Pokémon will alway steal your thunder, leaving you with little, if not hing. (Even today, many people still think that Digimon is ripping off Pokémon, whereas the other corporate Mons games are off the mainstream.) You may poin to Palworld, bu the Pokémon Company engaged in rather blatant lawfare, making sure that Pokémon will remain #1. If Pokémon can fight against legally-distinct Palworld, then why bother making a Mons game at all? You claim tha th ennui s a necessary step, yet I find that one of the biggest barriers.
Re: me being calm, I'd classify that first rant of mine being the exception, not the rule. I tend to be on the conflict-averse side, and I've been avoiding the pokemon thread itself for largely this reason. Your comment was the perfect storm of a way for me to speak in a pseudo-defence of the brand I know I cannot be fully rational about, talk about something I have a genuine issue with in the larger community, and do it while discussing a specific sub-topic I know particularly well. It's part of why my next post, and this one, both start with a frank-ish description of my own foibles and biases in the topic - I'm trying to avoid getting too locked down in an argument my rational mind knows I probably can't win in favour of one I feel I have to.
On the quote itself. This just circles back to the same point I'm making, though. You don't
need to be number one. You need to produce a product that has a sustainable budget and a sustainable audience, that's
it. Any creature collector is going to draw comparisons to Pokémon, that's just the way of it, but all it has to do is be distinct enough to genuinely escape those comparisons and stand on it's own.
Why bother doing something innovative? Because it can be sustainable via it's distinction, catering to a slightly different market. It's such a self-destructive mindset to think 'there's this one franchise that's super big and massive... nothing can possibly compete with it on it's terms... therefore, I shouldn't even try'. like ???????? You could have a 0.1% market share of the creature collecting genre and still be successful!
To be a bit more specific, though, I see the tedium/ennui as the movement from Bargaining to Depression, in the five stages of grief. As a whole, that's where the monster collecting genre is coming into now - denial is long gone, anger's been the de jure since gen 8, bargaining started with temtem and we're just now slipping into depression. But on the far side of that is acceptance, that you're not gonna find a perfect poke-like, and that devs won't be able to topple pokemon by just sawing the number plates off.
As much as the lawsuit against palworld is retarded on all levels, don't get me wrong... the palworld fandom was doing literally everything short of outright
daring pokemon to do it. Everyone made out every single thing to be the New Pokemon (tm), everyone was constantly talking about how this would totally show Pokémon what the real creature collecting (tm) experience was like, it was like there was a bunch of people who're crowded around a baby and openly jeering at Higuchi the Baby-Strangler about how this baby has
such a strangle-able neck and oooooh, is Higuchi getting maaaaaaad?
Like, in my eyes, the lawsuit's a symptom of the pokemon hatedom's fixation with presenting every single mon game that comes out as explicit and
direct competition with Pokémon, and the corporate slugs in the Pokémon company reacting predictably when everyone,
including those that theoretically want the new product to succeed, telling them that they need to act now and fast or they're gonna lose aaaaaaalllllll their market sharrrrreeee. And part of the way i evidence that is that Palworld does a lot to ape Ark's mechanics.... a game that, when you think about it, you realise is actually the exact thing I'm talking about - a wholly original creature-collector of it's own kind without Pokemon genetics in it at all. The most successful indie, creature-collector competitor to pokemon is either Ark or using Ark's template... which developed entirely seperately from Pokemon's philosophy while nobody was looking.
Me seeing the pre-ennui as a problem is as much the hatedom trapping the very different games to be inescapably compared with Pokémon as it is the devs having design tunnel-vision. I genuinely think that a period of deep, hopeless depression for the anti-Pokémon stans will actually be a net benefit for the genre, as it will help flush that mindset of comparing everything to Pokemon out a bit, and give new games a chance to stand on their own two feet before being framed as a competitor to the largest franchise on earth.
Because that's really at the core of all this. In my heart of hearts, I genuinely believe that the hardcore Pokémon antis are more destructive to the wider creature-collector community than Pokémon itself is. They're the ones who cannot abide a David just sneaking a spare bread roll from goliath and going home full and happy. They're the ones who push everyone to make their games more like pokemon, who staff every game with knockoffs and bootlegs and that fakemon they made when they were eight and another fucking cubone wannabe. They're the ones who will drag every other game into a fight they cannot win - and even if they can handle a skirmish, they'll drag them up to the battle again and again until they inevitably break down, and then... just leave, depressed, when they didn't get what they want.
Once they reach acceptance, once they finally let go... maybe that can change.
To use an example that's gone through very similar events, I refer you to the MMO genre, and World of Warcraft. It was the definitive answer to 'what is an mmo' for a whole generation of gamers, with everything else trying and failing to even make a dent. And even as it slowly started to shit itself, it was seemingly indefatigable, at the top undisputed for decades... and then FFXIV came. It wasn't a wow-like - in fact, whether by necessity or choice it seemed to spurn just about everything people tried to fight with wow on. The world's not one instance, it's massively disconnected. The faction conflict's entirely an afterthought and more window dressing than an actual mechanic. The dungeons focus on originality more through theming and styling than through varying mob collections and organisation. And it has a linear story that everyone has to play through.
It's a wildly different game than wow... and yet, it was able to grow to meet it and surpass it for
exactly that reason. Because the anti-wow people were in a deep fugue, and wrote it off as a doomed failure. Hell, it shit the bed so hard it had to get a reboot in 1.0! (and boy, I look at the way it's used to justify the 'we'll fix it later' crap in countless other genres and wonder if it was worth it.) But it developed on it's own, pulling primarily from the larger FF family of games for it's starting audience. They found their market and they found their game plan and they stuck with it, and lo and behold, they actually definitively eclipsed wow, at least for a time before the Tacos.
