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

[Thiletonomics]

And is anyone else disappointed that unique pre-battle themes disappeared in gen VII? It's a tiny detail but it gave each trainer class its own personality.

IIRC, they added pre-battle themes in Sword and Shield for a few trainer classes, but they seemed to have done away with them again in Scarlet and Violet.

 

[SnowBall]

There is nothing memorable about the gym leaders of the first three generations in the games themselves. The only thing that makes them memorable are nostalgia and the anime and even those two factors really only apply to gen 1 and to a lesser extent 2. Gen 5’s gym leaders were actually involved in the story and had lives outside their gyms which did not carry over to gen 6.

 

[Xerxes IX]

There is nothing memorable about the gym leaders of the first three generations in the games themselves. The only thing that makes them memorable are nostalgia and the anime and even those two factors really only apply to gen 1 and to a lesser extent 2. Gen 5’s gym leaders were actually involved in the story and had lives outside their gyms which did not carry over to gen 6.

Whitney's Miltank is the only really memorable thing to me in the games, which makes sense since the Pokemon are the real boss fights.

 

[Executive Petrel]

There is nothing memorable about the gym leaders of the first three generations in the games themselves. The only thing that makes them memorable are nostalgia and the anime and even those two factors really only apply to gen 1 and to a lesser extent 2. Gen 5’s gym leaders were actually involved in the story and had lives outside their gyms which did not carry over to gen 6.

Gen 1-3/4 gym leaders gave off the vibe of mysterious and powerful bosses you need to overcome to finish a certain area, the HMs adding up to this perception. In the newer games they are only annoying support characters. Gen 5 was alright, especially them appearing to fight off the seven sages at N's castle.
Gen 6 has some ordinary trainers stronger and more memorable than gym leaders.

 

[Anonitolia]

Gen 1-3/4 gym leaders gave off the vibe of mysterious and powerful bosses

Did we even play the same sets of games?

The only gen you could argue that set up the gym leaders as "mysterious and powerful bosses" as opposed to just tougher-than-usual trainers is maybe gen 1, considering how the leaders were treated in-game and their designs, but even then outside media always portrayed them as much more friendly and unimposing and kind of diluted the effect.

From gen 2 onwards, you get characters like Whitney (immature crybaby who's dunked on by her own gym trainers), Jasmine (shy girl who's explicitly given a role in-story where you help her out), and Claire (another immature brat who's explicitly demeaned by the story itself)- people who're hardly "mysterious", often friendly, that were almost always helpful or transparent when needed.

Even before then, gym leaders almost never gated progress for a good 3 generations. It's only around Sinnoh when leaders started being mandatory roadblocks instead of powerful challenges that tested whether you were ready to go to the next area or ballsy enough to just go there yourself. You can see this as early as Kanto's midgame, where the entire stretch from Surge to Sabrina can be done in whatever order while you explore the entire east and southeast of the region to your heart's content. The game definitely nudges you into a specific order, hard, but you can choose to ignore that order if you'd like and take on Sabrina before Erika without any significant penalty to exploration.
This aspect kind of diminished the longer the series went on- the second half of Johto is about the same as Kanto's in terms of exploration (arguably even more lenient because levels are no longer nearly as large an issue), Hoenn only really had Brawly and Winona as optional skips... and then, by Sinnoh, the only gym leader you could really skip is maybe Maylene, outside of Fantina being forcibly skipped over in DP (by the plot, not the player- you had no choice here like in the others).

I agree that the newer gym leaders are more annoying companions than the previous- Gamefreak seems to have taken Unova's introduction of actual personalities for most of them to heart, but forgot to actually give us reason to care for those personalities like you could in Unova (see: castle fight, Pinwheel Forest incident, Elesa vs Bianca's father, etc)- but it's disingenuous to say that the previous leaders were any better. They were flat, cardboard cut-outs at best and bratty hinderances to player progression at worst.

 

[Executive Petrel]

Gen 1 has Lt..Surge talking about the Pokemon war.
Koga is a Ninja who hides behind invisible walls.
Blaine locks his gym and hides the key in the burnt mansion where Mewtwo was created.
Sabrina is a creepy loner and beat the Blackbelts ass without breaking a sweat and the final Gym Leader is fucking Giovanni.

The Power they give off is delivered pretty subtle and implicite, which imo is a powerful design element.
They aren't saying much and their Pokemon have trash movesets, but NPCs talking about 'em almost in a fearful way.
In previous Gens, it was Like "Gym Leader x crushed my Pokemon, he's brutal", from Gen 5 onwards: "Our Gym Leader is a Hero and beloved by kids and adults alike. He also scored four Touchdowns in the 1966 city Championship game..."

The HM system added up to this effect.
If you beat a certain foe, the game considered you to be powerful enough to navigate through a whole new, lot bigger and more dangerous area.
Today is either everything linear or openworld without proper Level scaling that makes the game linear anyways.

You have a point with the leaders often having silly designs and personalities, perfectly okay for a kids game.

Maybe its just me who dug to deep into Creepypastas.
There ist a YouTube Channel called "GoldenOwl". He claims to be a game designer, analysing and rating the most infamous Boss Battles and tropes in Pokemon and other games from a creators point of view.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6ibKcU8QWJA

 

[30+GameOvers]

I agree with @Executive Petrel here. It's pathetic what they've done with the gym leaders in later gens past 5, arguably only Gen 7 did something right with them since they're actual characters and engage with you instead of being boss battles by themselves for the most part. I think a combination of the earlier gens where they were mysterious and powerful, but also engaged with the world around them and had impact on the story like in Gen 5/7 would be the best of both worlds. Elite 4 suffer from the same problems, aside from some Champions that played a role in the story, they're just as bland and forgettable as the gym leaders.

 

[Anonitolia]

Gen 1 has Lt..Surge talking about the Pokemon war.
Koga is a Ninja who hides behind invisible walls.
Blaine locks his gym and hides the key in the burnt mansion where Mewtwo was created.
Sabrina is a creepy loner and beat the Blackbelts ass without breaking a sweat and the final Gym Leader is fucking Giovanni.

The Power they give off is delivered pretty subtle and implicite, which imo is a powerful design element.
They aren't saying much and their Pokemon have trash movesets, but NPCs talking about 'em almost in a fearful way.
In previous Gens, it was Like "Gym Leader x crushed my Pokemon, he's brutal", from Gen 5 onwards: "Our Gym Leader is a Hero and beloved by kids and adults alike. He also scored four Touchdowns in the 1966 city Championship game..."

The HM system added up to this effect.
If you beat a certain foe, the game considered you to be powerful enough to navigate through a whole new, lot bigger and more dangerous area.
Today is either everything linear or openworld without proper Level scaling that makes the game linear anyways.

You have a point with the leaders often having silly designs and personalities, perfectly okay for a kids game.

Maybe its just me who dug to deep into Creepypastas.
There ist a YouTube Channel called "GoldenOwl". He claims to be a game designer, analysing and rating the most infamous Boss Battles and tropes in Pokemon and other games from a creators point of view.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6ibKcU8QWJA

Gen 1's leaders actually had backstory and were interesting, yes, I'll agree on that.

It does not make them any more mysterious than the other gym leaders.
It might give them a little bit of mystique- Surge especially- but a lot of that mystique disappears when you see Blaine making endless fire puns and testing super basic knowledge instead of playing on his scientist elements or when Koga decides to fuck with you by making an invisible maze alongside disguising his gym trainers (I personally think just the illusions would've been more fun), leading to any intrigue being spoiled via the sheer annoyance caused by dumb gym gimmicks. Any interest I had in Surge's war disappeared (while playing) the moment I had to touch that stupid fucking trash puzzle again.
Sabrina comes close to proving your point since every single gym trainer hypes her up pretty hard and her puzzle is pretty appropriate... but that puzzle is also made of fucking warp tiles in identical rooms so it has the exact same problems as all the rest- just with less "Haha I tricked you! Prepare to fight!" dialogue and more actual exposition.

Newer games don't have this problem, but that's because there's no intrigue left to spoil (and whatever intrigue there is gets washed away quickly when the gym leaders never shut up for more than five minutes while battling them). It doesn't help that gym puzzles died a grisly death with XY (or ORAS, I guess?) and have since been replaced with one-off minigames that never take more than 5 minutes and aren't memorable enough to be annoying nor challenging enough to be memorable.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Gen 1 has Lt..Surge talking about the Pokemon war.
Koga is a Ninja who hides behind invisible walls.
Blaine locks his gym and hides the key in the burnt mansion where Mewtwo was created.
Sabrina is a creepy loner and beat the Blackbelts ass without breaking a sweat and the final Gym Leader is fucking Giovanni.

The Power they give off is delivered pretty subtle and implicite, which imo is a powerful design element.
They aren't saying much and their Pokemon have trash movesets, but NPCs talking about 'em almost in a fearful way.
In previous Gens, it was Like "Gym Leader x crushed my Pokemon, he's brutal", from Gen 5 onwards: "Our Gym Leader is a Hero and beloved by kids and adults alike. He also scored four Touchdowns in the 1966 city Championship game..."

The HM system added up to this effect.
If you beat a certain foe, the game considered you to be powerful enough to navigate through a whole new, lot bigger and more dangerous area.
Today is either everything linear or openworld without proper Level scaling that makes the game linear anyways.

You have a point with the leaders often having silly designs and personalities, perfectly okay for a kids game.

Maybe its just me who dug to deep into Creepypastas.
There ist a YouTube Channel called "GoldenOwl". He claims to be a game designer, analysing and rating the most infamous Boss Battles and tropes in Pokemon and other games from a creators point of view.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6ibKcU8QWJA

I think you just grew up. I lent my copy of Shield to a friend to play with his son back in 2019 and he liked Hop and was always excited to face off against him.

 

[30+GameOvers]

>You just grew out of it
This is the same franchise that gave us a timeless character like Miror B. Just because the game is aimed at all ages or children doesn't mean you can't have a well written and interesting character, I already said so in this thread. I think the main issue is once again with Gamefreak being hacks rather than Pokemon as a franchise not being allowed to do x, y or z.

 

[Anonitolia]

This is the same franchise that gave us a timeless character like Miror B.

From a completely different writing team in a spin-off.

 

[30+GameOvers]

From a completely different writing team in a spin-off.

Which drives my point home that gamefreak are talentless hacks and literally anybody else can do a better job than them? Yes. The two GC games show that you can make an all ages Pokemon game and have it both be interesting and fun without pandering to a toddler audience or making half-assed content, so this line of reasoning is nothing but cope. Really, when did it become haram to criticize the biggest franchise in the world, with resources and popularity that other studios would literally kill for?
BTW I hate the antichrist and I hate the Cut HM. The move is useless and there is so many goddamn bushes even in the later parts of the games so you NEED to keep a useless Pokemon on you if you want to get all the items. This is a problem in the post-game area I was talking about earlier in the romhack I'm playing

 

[Anonitolia]

Which drives my point home that gamefreak are talentless hacks and literally anybody else can do a better job than them?

The way you worded your post made it look more like you were implying that Gamefreak wrote Miror B.

Anyways, that's unrelated. We were talking about gym leaders not having personalities, not the fact that it's Gamefreak's fault. That should be assumed in a thread like this, to be honest, so it's hardly necessary to keep reiterating the reasons why.

Yeah, fuck Cut. Don't think anybody's going to disagree with you there. At least it isn't Flash or Defog, though.

 

[Catgirl Tyranid]

This is the same franchise that gave us a timeless character like Miror B

I need to go back and play Coliseum again. Think I'll Nuzlocke it.

 

[30+GameOvers]

I need to go back and play Coliseum again. Think I'll Nuzlocke it.

There is a romhack I am planning on playing once I am done with SuperGold97. It's basically a remaster of the game, including physical/special split, later gen moves and fairy typing, along with more shadow pokemon and tougher encounters. That I like, what I don't like is changes to the type chart and changed typing for different pokemon(Ninetales is now dark type and fire type, I think and Stantler is a psychic type for example). Still, it is the only mod that I know of for the game. The romhacks can be found on Project Pokemon website btw.

 

[Catgirl Tyranid]

There is a romhack I am planning on playing once I am done with SuperGold97. It's basically a remaster of the game, including physical/special split, later gen moves and fairy typing, along with more shadow pokemon and tougher encounters. That I like, what I don't like is changes to the type chart and changed typing for different pokemon(Ninetales is now dark type and fire type, I think and Stantler is a psychic type for example). Still, it is the only mod that I know of for the game. The romhacks can be found on Project Pokemon website btw.

I was going to break out my gamecube, but I guess I need to figure out how to emulate it. I hadn't bothered yet.

 

[30+GameOvers]

I was going to break out my gamecube, but I guess I need to figure out how to emulate it. I hadn't bothered yet.

If you're going to emulate it, I suggest downloading "Trigger's PC" as well. It's a third gen pokemon bank, it lets you transfer pokemon between savefiles of all gen 3 games(but not cheat them in), also lets you transfer items/money even trade evolve pokemon. Hell, the app even has "achievements" which grant you otherwise unavailable event items or pokemon after reaching a certain point in the game(they are properly handed to you as well so you can in theory transfer them to bank and even home down the line)
Of course, you will need actual gba or gc savefiles, but there are ways to transfer those(or you can download them off the internet). This way, you can actually go with whatever team you want in Colosseum instead of relying on the pokemon you catch, which I found very enjoyable. The game lets you try out various double battle combinations that you simply never get to use in mainline games, ditto for Gale of Darkness.

 

[Executive Petrel]

but a lot of that mystique disappears when you see Blaine making endless fire puns and testing super basic knowledge instead of playing on his scientist elements

I really thought TM28 was TOMBSTONER.

Koga decides to fuck with you by making an invisible maze alongside disguising his gym trainers

That was gen 2

stupid fucking trash puzzle again.

It doesn't help that gym puzzles died a grisly death with XY (or ORAS, I guess?) and have since been replaced with one-off minigames that never take more than 5 minutes and aren't memorable enough to be annoying nor challenging enough to be memorable.

Surge has always been cautios since the war so it is fitting. I'd rather prefer this buggy mess to the stupid wooloo minigame in Gen 8.

he liked Hop and was always excited to face off against him.

 

[NerdShamer]

Speaking of Gen 8 have you guys noticed that Gym puzzles were gradually becoming easier as the years went past? Like, going from wondering through an maze in the dark, to solving an math question (cuz the devs are lazy), to going to an really short (but sometimes fun) minigame.

 

[Anonitolia]

That was gen 2

Where it was almost entirely unchanged from gen 1...