Pokémon (Not-So) Griefing Thread - Scarlet and Violet Released with 10 Million Copies in First 3 Days in Buggy States

[Anonitolia]

I love TRPGs so that actually looks cool, also I remember loving the Pokemon Dungeon games as well.

Conquest is as cool as it looks, if not cooler.

Spoiler: relatively large spoiler, used as caution

The game kills your save after you beat the main story and then offers a bunch of stories for side characters, though, so don't go in expecting something especially story-driven. There is a story, and it's half-decent, but it acts more as an extended tutorial and is nowhere near as prominent in any other part of the game.
Every single other story is maybe 80% as long as the initial main story, mostly due to less dialogue + less story-specific events + less stopping the game to introduce new mechanics/kingdoms.

PMD2 is lauded as the series' peak by the degenerates and sex pests who call that fandom home, but it really is quite good. Explorers of Sky specifically fleshes out a lot of story characters with huge side missions and extra features and is well worth giving a look. Darkness/Time have the same story but have less hero/partner choices, dumb version restrictions, less features and less postgame. The only advantage they offer over Sky is that they're like 20 bucks instead of 120 on the secondhand market. (Just emulate Sky.)

PMD3 is controversial, for good reason, as it makes a lot of gameplay blunders that make the pretty decent story a bit hard to get through. I can personally look past these blunders and appreciate what it was trying to do so I'd recommend it with the caveat that it is a genuine downgrade to its predecessor in some aspects and Axew breaks the game's difficulty so badly that it basically makes the entire story able to be autopiloted. At least it isn't Super though. Don't play Super.

RE: everyone recommending ORAS, I'd genuinely recommend against it. It's an okay remake if you somehow look past the horribly mangled story, lack of postgame, and barren side content now that Online is no more. Everyone always talks about the lack of Frontier, but why does nobody ever mention the game forcing a mega-evolving Legendary onto your team past the fifth gym and how many times the story interrupts you to ask you if you want the game to play itself (Mauville warp, Brendan's constant "do you want to heal"s before Fallarbor or slightly difficult sections, etc.)? Nothing of the gimped New Mauville or Sky Pillar, both of which are now just singular rooms (with bonus cutscene for the latter)? The downgraded soundtrack that replaces gen 3's awesome trumpets with apathetic synths or woodwinds?

The soundtrack isn't bad, don't get me wrong, but I find it far inferior to the originals' and don't get all the praise. Am I the only one who liked that trumpet soundfont. lol.

PLA is also okay if you want a change of pace but it's a Switch Pokémon game. This means it still has:

• a very poorly-written and intrusive storyline interrupting gameplay
• little-to-no depth in its exploration and graphics
• a severe lack of meaningful content past the barren main story
• a lot of glitches

Lucky for PLA, its gameplay loop is actual crack and it's already sucked away hundreds of hours of my life. I would recommend it if you've done everything else and are very bored/looking for something somewhat fresh, but said recommendation also comes with a health advisory and a suggestion to clear your weekend because otherwise you will lose an entire day and not notice it.

 

[Computer God Autism]

Same ORAS is at least a better remake than anything on the switch and the music was great.

Given ORAS' only competition is BDSP that's not saying much.

ORAS was the last Pokemon mainline Pokemon title I found myself enjoying, and I appreciate what was added to it and the clear ambition some of it has, but on balance it doesn't surpass Emerald and pares away a lot Emerald did have if you weren't just blitzing through it. Compared to FRLG which were just Gen III updates to R/B/G that fixed their bugs and added an aftergame and HGSS which did to Crystal what Crystal did to Gold/Silver, ORAS was disappointing.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Given ORAS' only competition is BDSP that's not saying much.

ORAS was the last Pokemon mainline Pokemon title I found myself enjoying, and I appreciate what was added to it and the clear ambition some of it has, but on balance it doesn't surpass Emerald and pares away a lot Emerald did have if you weren't just blitzing through it. Compared to FRLG which were just Gen III updates to R/B/G that fixed their bugs and added an aftergame and HGSS which did to Crystal what Crystal did to Gold/Silver, ORAS was disappointing.

With the current leaks, or rather I guess recent leaks, knowing full well that there was so much more planned for seemingly barren games of Gen 6 and 7 just depresses me. You just know that there were people who wanted to add Battle Frontier into ORAS just like we had one in HGSS, but this time it was stricken down.

 

[Jarch6]

by the degenerates and sex pests who call that fandom home

I'm somewhat familiar with Pokemon degeneracy (who could forget everyone's favorite vaporeon copypasta), but I didn't know PMD had a higher concetration of it. Why? is it because your MC becomes a Pokémon?

 

[Anonitolia]

I'm somewhat familiar with Pokemon degeneracy (who could forget everyone's favorite vaporeon copypasta)

god that thing is so close to the tip of this horrible iceberg that it's not even funny and I envy you very very dearly

I didn't know PMD had a higher concetration of it. Why? is it because your MC becomes a Pokémon?

One word: fursonas.

Longer version: Obligatory reading here. The OP is horribly outdated but it's informative enough. TL;DR: what started off as a pretty normal fandom quickly devolved when the vast majority of it (since it was very small and continues to be very small) joined a group run by a queer groomer that proceeded to rig contests in her favor, throw fetish gear into her "PG" group RPG, and then recruit a small cult of people just as, if not more, insane than she was to defend her reputation. This eventually spiraled into her fucking dogs, fleeing states to fuck dogs, and getting a pedo hubby who tried to lure more vulnerable kids to their dogfucking den so that she could fuck dogs and children with her delusional husband.

This kind of person is maybe as bad as the fandom gets, but there are a lot of people like her by virtue of her influencing basically everyone who's 20+ and still a PMD fan.

Some other stellar examples include: rape fetish guy, gay pedophile, [insert every stereotypical LGBT groomer here], and so many tumblristas that I cannot fucking name them all and have instead been autistically a-logging in the Bad Webcomics thread.

Things happen to peoples' brains when you rally them around a series that appeals uniquely to furries (you get to BE the sparkledog and go on Wholesome but Dark adventures with your best friend forever who loves you unconditionally, never criticizes you, and does whatever you say without question while also sleeping next to you 24/7), keep the series dormant for nearly a decade straight, let an active criminal dominate the VAST majority of fandom activities for years straight and then have every single successor to that criminal be similarly influenced/incompetent/evil. It tends to lead to a bit of a clusterfuck and I personally think it puts a lot of main-series autism to shame with its most tepid examples.

 

[Computer God Autism]

(Just emulate Sky.)

Seconded, Gamefaqs still has all the wondermail codes on it too. It's also useful for unlocking the now-undownloadable episodes for Conquest.

PMD3 is controversial, for good reason, as it makes a lot of gameplay blunders that make the pretty decent story a bit hard to get through.

You are probably the first person I've seen say that Gates to Infinity's story was decent, let alone better than Super's. Not to say Super's is good by any stretch - I don't have many memories of it besides how ridiculous the ending was, but that's still better than the exasperation I still feel when hearing PMD3 again.

Honestly, I wouldn't really recommend playing any PMD game aside from 2 if you're not a kid or into grinding; it takes a lot of time to progress and PMD3 and Super cut out the easiest methods to play it efficiently, and most people are recommending/remembering it for the story anyways.

past the horribly mangled story

R/S/E were still in that phase where Pokemon was struggling to have a story to begin with, I don't think ORAS mangled it so much as was just being self-indulgent. I understand why some people who really liked the implication of you bullying May into giving up Pokemon battling altogether in the originals were disappointed, but I personally didn't mind ORAS's direction and appreciated that Gamefreak at least tried to give themselves a narrative out of XY's retardation by

Spoiler

having Zinnia imply that everything Gen 6 onwards takes place in an alternate dimension so I can completely disassociate modern Pokemon with my childhood.

Besides, the writing missteps pail in comparison to most of the character redesigns.

Spoiler

game forcing a mega-evolving Legendary onto your team past the fifth gym

Spoiler

Honestly, that and the later Mega Rayquaza cheesing Zinnia was something I didn't really mind. Mega Evolution's existence already broke what little balance Pokemon already had, I'd rather them just embrace it and make it part of larger gameplay mechanics/story vis-a-vis soaring and the Delta Episode than it just unceremoniously existing in the background.

Am I the only one who liked that trumpet soundfont.

No, Gen 3 trumpets are one of the most surface level memes about Hoenn. Imo the only good theme ORAS added was Zinnia's, to the point it's the only theme I really remember from Gen 6.

With the current leaks, or rather I guess recent leaks, knowing full well that there was so much more planned for seemingly barren games of Gen 6 and 7 just depresses me. You just know that there were people who wanted to add Battle Frontier into ORAS just like we had one in HGSS, but this time it was stricken down.

I think the bigger question it raises is what happened between Gen V and VI that caused it. They kept mostly the same pace they had from Gen IV-V but only a fraction of the content. I don't really think the shift to 3D can be reasonably blamed as the culprit beyond X/Y.

I'm somewhat familiar with Pokemon degeneracy (who could forget everyone's favorite vaporeon copypasta), but I didn't know PMD had a higher concetration of it. Why? is it because your MC becomes a Pokémon?

Personally, I've not encountered a higher amount of it with the PMD fans - but I also don't go out of my way to interact with the Pokemon fanbase. That said most of the people I have talked to about PMD2 with were normal enough, but they've mostly been people I've known for a decade or about.

Longer version: Obligatory reading here.

I doubt this is reflective of the majority of PMD enjoyers but I'm glad I never got involved in whatever constitutes the active fandom.

 

[Air support]

only good theme ORAS added was Zinnia's,

Hard Disagree almost every track in ORAS sounds better than the originals i'm pretty sure the only ones who prefer trumpets are the ones who grew up with it.

Obligatory reading here.

Anything doing with females in any Pokemon on Furry fandom end up being the mentally ill sexually depraved autistic shit you have ever seen.

 

[anliteralidiot]

Am I the only one who liked that trumpet soundfont. lol.

Hard Disagree almost every track in ORAS sounds better than the originals i'm pretty sure the only ones who prefer trumpets are the ones who grew up with it.

It may be because I'm a Touhou fan, but I'm a sucker for midi trumpets. They're so cute...

It's sad that people these days are going for "realistic" sound fonts, over fun ones.

At least Pokemon hired Toby Fox, and he's got touhou DNA in his music.

 

[Anonitolia]

You are probably the first person I've seen say that Gates to Infinity's story was decent, let alone better than Super's.

I have a serious vendetta against shitty nonsensical twists, so that kind of skews me against Super quite heavily. (actual spoilers ahead) Also I really really like Hydreigon (the Voice of Life made me love it way more) and could personally relate to the ending more than others due to a few events in my personal life, so that may also be helping things.

Both of them have worse stories than PMD1 and 2. But at least Gates doesn't keep you stuck in a fucking school setting for 1/3 of it and never forces you to share screentime with some of the least-interesting guildmates ever. I genuinely liked pretty much all of Post Town's residents, regardless of how one-note some of them were, which is more than I can say for most of Super's cast.

...I am also rather biased against Super because I found its gameplay almost as bad as GTi's (if not worse due to the FUCKING BREAK SYSTEM). I just really don't like Super lol.

No, Gen 3 trumpets are one of the most surface level memes about Hoenn.

Yeah, but they originated as mockery during the older days when Hoenn was a black sheep and people took any excuse to poke fun at it. It only resurfaced as actual nostalgia around gen 6 during the original remake sperging, after which point it's slowly declined in relevancy.

R/S/E were still in that phase where Pokemon was struggling to have a story to begin with, I don't think ORAS mangled it so much as was just being self-indulgent. I understand why some people who really liked the implication of you bullying May into giving up Pokemon battling altogether in the originals were disappointed, but I personally didn't mind ORAS's direction and appreciated that Gamefreak at least tried to give themselves a narrative out of XY's retardation by

Spoiler

having Zinnia imply that everything Gen 6 onwards takes place in an alternate dimension so I can completely disassociate modern Pokemon with my childhood.

It mangled the story by being self-indulgent, yes. At least gen 3's goofy story mostly stayed out of your way until the seventh gym, ORAS stops you every fucking gym to keep reminding you of its dumbass plot. And the Zinnia shit did such horrible damage to the worldbuilding that I truly believe that's where the series jumped the shark. Had she shut her trap and let the series stay in one universe with one Mega timeline, it could've warded off a bunch of the really stupid shit that came around later on like the Paradoxes actually being from alternate universes or the Ultra Beasts being from alternate universes or every single new addition being justified as weird and out of place/outright lazy because "it's another universe".
Also something something removal of stakes something something can't take a story seriously when it can just "nu-uh" the absolute worst shit with a timeline reset.

Imo the only good theme ORAS added was Zinnia's, to the point it's the only theme I really remember from Gen 6.

Did ORAS even add themes outside of Zinnia's? All I can think of are remixes. The non-Frontier island is just a remix of the Frontier's theme with a calypso infusion, all the proto-Ultra Wormholes just play the original tracks of the legendaries they spit out, and everything else is from the original gen 3 games. Even the credits are a remix of gen 3's credits. Correct me if i'm wrong, my memory is failing me.

I think the bigger question it raises is what happened between Gen V and VI that caused it. They kept mostly the same pace they had from Gen IV-V but only a fraction of the content. I don't really think the shift to 3D can be reasonably blamed as the culprit beyond X/Y.

Funnily enough, I'm pretty sure this was also answered. Supposedly, Gen 5 was supposed to last until 2015 but was cut off much earlier (presumably due to backlash), with Gen 6 being rushed out the door for the 20th anniversary. I'll link a source if I find it-- I remember seeing this in one of the MANY /ppg/s that cropped up on /vp/ after October-- but that's what I remember.

 

[anliteralidiot]

Gen 5 was supposed to last until 2015 but was cut off much earlier (presumably due to backlash)

I'm sure the earthquake didn't help....

 

[Computer God Autism]

if not worse due to the FUCKING BREAK SYSTEM

To me that was chump change compared to the retardation of limiting you to only one mission per dungeon. I also appreciate Super tried adding back in a lot of stuff that GTI cut, even if it mangled it - every game after PMD2 seems to have been trying to reinvent a formula that fundamentally didn't need it.

Yeah, but they originated as mockery during the older days when Hoenn was a black sheep and people took any excuse to poke fun at it.

Gen III was my intro so I was too young to really remember any Hoenn mockery - especially since Gen III was when a lot of the first Pokemon fans started to drop off - but I remember the Hoenn trumpet memes actually started coming into nostalgic vogue around Gen V since most people assumed we were getting Hoenn remakes then instead of BW2.

ORAS stops you every fucking gym to keep reminding you of its dumbass plot.

The plot is more or less the same as R/S/E - the complaint is that modern Pokemon holds your hand too much, which is fair but I honestly think is made by people who are in the unhappy middle of being too impatient to read and too retarded to skip. ORAS's plot is a lot less intrusive than XY and Alola.

Spoiler

it could've warded off a bunch of the really stupid shit that came around later on like the Paradoxes actually being from alternate universes or the Ultra Beasts being from alternate universes

Spoiler

It wouldn't have. Multiverses were all the rage in the 10s and they would still have leaned into it for Gen 7, nevermind the Fairy Type and its retroactive application already broke the world so thoroughly I just prefer the confirmation that Gen 6+ isn't related to what came before so the decent stuff doesn't have to be tainted by it.

Did ORAS even add themes outside of Zinnia's?

It gave Wally a theme, which would be decent in an Orre game but is really out of place in ORAS.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I think the best PMD vidya is Explorers of Sky, but PMD games can get rather high in the BS level.

Like stepping on a Sludge Trap and all the food turning to fast food Grimy Food, stepping on PP Zero Trap and losing all PP for Rest, the exit room is a Monster House, etc.

 

[Anonitolia]

I'm sure the earthquake didn't help....

I don't really see how the earthquake would have made Black and White 2 come out sooner than they wanted, ngl. Seriously, it could've played a part but I'm not convinced it's what made them rush to get gen 5 over with and gen 6 into the mainstream. They made such a big deal of gen 6 being a global release and having so much focus on older Pokémon that I can't believe that the backlash didn't matter at all, especially since BW2 introduced that heavy emphasis on old Pokémon in the first place. Besides, I don't think we'll ever know if the earthquake affected development until someone with way too much free time manages to translate those work emails, so for now all we can do is speculate.

To me that was chump change compared to the retardation of limiting you to only one mission per dungeon.

That's my biggest gripe with PMD3 too, but I didn't mind it as much as I thought I would (which is especially impressive given that I'm the type to load up on a whole page's worth of missions for one specific dungeon and then speedrun all of them in one go). The break system irked me far far more by forcing me either into using the shitty overpowered stuff they force on you see: Salamence specifically and making dungeons a snoozefest or the hilariously underpowered shit that makes things unfair purely because one of your more balanced members didn't feel like coming along that day.

I honestly think is made by people who are in the unhappy middle of being too impatient to read and too retarded to skip

Maybe generally, but I am actually quite the sucker for reading. Besides, it's not like you get the option to skip in these wonderful games.

ORAS's plot is a lot less intrusive than XY and Alola.

The difference is that ORAS has a significantly less-intrusive plot option preceding it. XY don't even have a third version to go to, while Alola is completely unplayable for the impatient because it barrages you with literal hours of tutorials in both sets of games.
If I want to play Hoenn, I will inherently be put off by a version of it that has as much text as XY. It bloats RSE's story to XY levels while adding XY levels of content eg: almost nothing, if anything at all.

It wouldn't have. Multiverses were all the rage in the 10s and they would still have leaned into it for Gen 7, nevermind the Fairy Type and its retroactive application already broke the world so thoroughly I just prefer the confirmation that Gen 6+ isn't related to what came before so the decent stuff doesn't have to be tainted by it.

That's fair enough, however I will cope and seethe regardless because multiverse shit getting anywhere near an established franchise I like is worse to me than shitty additions to that franchise. At least if it's a shitty addition, you don't start questioning why the story is focusing on a worse version of itself instead of switching universes to the cooler option without all the new dumb shit.

It gave Wally a theme, which would be decent in an Orre game but is really out of place in ORAS.

Oh wow, right, I guess it speaks to how memorable it is that I completely forgot it.
God, listening to it now, it was the canary in the coal mine for the later generations' absolute abuse of electric guitar for every single vaguely cool moment ever. A shame that it holds up better than some of the later stuff, too.

His encounter theme is way better, even if it's oddly girly. At least it makes me think of a mostly-theoretical happy Wally instead of a completely different person.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

The game kills your save after you beat the main story

Nah it doesn't. Unless you save in those side-stories maybe, but I haven't done that to see.

 

[Anonitolia]

Nah it doesn't. Unless you save in those side-stories maybe, but I haven't done that to see.

I'm not sure if we're on the same wavelength? The game saves your state after you beat the main story and doesn't let you replay or continue the main story after that. Rinse and repeat whenever you beat a side story, but you can replay those all you want.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

[...]

I was able to finish that main story, though I cannot re-play it.

 

[Computer God Autism]

I was able to finish that main story, though I cannot re-play it.

Yeah you do have to do a new save, but the 'main' story is really just a tutorial and only about 10% of the overall content in the game. The final story you unlock is basically a power fantasy redux for it.

 

[Registration]

I should go back to play the game that I left unfinished...

 

[Dysnomia]

I used to dislike shiny Espeon because I thought the green was a weird choice. Then I saw a reddit post about how it looks like an alien kitty. I love shiny Espeon now.

 

[AnotherPleb]

I think the bigger question it raises is what happened between Gen V and VI that caused it.

Gen 5 had some of the biggest backlash the series has ever encountered. I can guarantee that GF told the devs they had to play it safe and pander from that point on.

Did ORAS even add themes outside of Zinnia's?

As another poster stated you had Wally's theme, but it is way too slow and self indulgent. This GBA soundfont remix shows that potential was there though. The trumpets and drumbeat give it the intensity the fight deserves.