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

[zyclonPD]

 

[I_Lurk_Here]

This is pretty autistic of me but one of the reasons I like Pokémon is because it's Pokémon; I like the character, Pokémon and location designs as well as a bit of the game's lore. It's why I can't get into "Pokémon killers" and sometimes romhacks that add in too many fakemons. I think it can be compared to how some pieces of media (like Suzerain) take place in worlds heavily inspired by our own compared to actual historical strategy. Or how there's retro-inspired media compared to media that actually came out decades ago. I feel like it's one of those things that has a feeling that (usually) can't be replicated.

I wonder... what are this thread's thoughts on Pokémon Sage?

Has there been any updates for it in the last year?

 

[TVB]

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Translation:

 

[Kurohige]

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I really wonder how many people would ride or die Gen 8/9 (minus Legends), if the games were still $40? At the end of the day, consoomerism is consoomerism. Content restrictions be damned if the price barrier was lowered or more familiar to my wallet.

 

[The Invisible Man]

Modern Pokémon games are garbage because they are unpolished and buggy. Pokémon red and blue are good games because they are unpolished and buggy.

 

[Howling Janny Dog]

I'm a simple man, I don't ask for much except for a new bottlecap that lowers IVs to 0.

 

[zyclonPD]

I'm a simple man, I don't ask for much except for a new bottlecap that lowers IVs to 0.

no stalker you can not lower your attack stat. Enjoy Foul Play stalker.

 

[Horribadger]

It should be noted that this was also the first race mixed couple in Pokemon, since she has a white husband. She was also the first legit girlboss in the franchise, as for the short time you meet her the game establishes that she wears the pants(or the apron) in the family.
Yeah, Gamefreak was really confused as to what the Westerners really wanted and you can tell they didn't really know what they were doing. They still don't, you can tell that they don't have the heart in following the new ESG guidelines and making everyone look ugly, they're just doing it because their superiors are telling them this is what Americans want. Nilantic have recently pozzed up Pokemon GO, but since they're from San Francisco this sort of thing is more natural to them.

For better or for worse, Gen 5 was the last time that Gamefreak put any sort of soul into the franchise. Gen 6 had that too to a degree, you could tell they had grand plans for their first 3D entry, but they tried backpedaling way too hard after the Gen 5 controversy by pandering to Kanto fans and their tech was simply not up to snuff. They couldn't do everything they wanted, awful performance during normal play and especially triple battles is the best example of their lack of optimization.
Gen 7 was a special case, I think it worked but you could tell that a different approach was taken. The good, and the bad, came from that new approach as you could still see the same atrophy that set in during Gen 6 if you looked deep enough. As of Gen 8, and now Gen 9, the decay is unquestionable. I wish Pokemon would go back to stupid controversies like this one with Lenora, rather than the likes of Dexit or the 70$ DLCs or the recent ugly trainers and DEI. At least back then, Gamefreak genuinely wanted to make a better product, even if they did stupid shit to get there, these days they can't even pretend to care.

My schizo take is that the rot started to set in mid-ORAS but is masked by those games pulling most of their content from existing games. To some degree you can tell by the promotion- X and Y had a sense of mystery over the legendaries like oh wow what're they gonna be, but for ORAS they just showed footage of Groudon and Kyogre being generic and existing, to the point Groudon's promo got turned into a "it's fucking nothing" meme. They could have shown them shining in the darkness like they were about to power up to foreshadow the reveal of their new forms, but instead they just fucking didn't give a shit. It feels like with XY there was some intention to inspire wonder, some greater idea behind it, and that kind of transferred to ORAS- remember AZOTH and the alchemy theories? What ever happened to that shit? But after that they just stopped having ideas, like in general. And of course there's the shitass Delta Zinnia story that was basically foreshadowing for all the fucking miserable bullshit we'd get in every game since.

My deepest schizo desire is to join or found an indie studio that gets enough clout to get tasked by Gamefreak with making some spinoff or remake, and remind the world what a good Pokemon game looks like. Like, I want to be ILCA with more creative freedom.

 

[Freelance Police]

Probably a hot take but I think people suck off gen 5 and gen 7 way too much. Gen 5 has its merits for having a completely unique roster of Pokemon and having good music, but my main gripes with both of those games are how they handled story. All of a sudden I see people looking back at gen 5 and praising it for having a story and that the only complaints was how the story kept the player on a leash, but the real problem is that gen 5 had a shit story. Game freak took an interesting topic about the morality of cockfighting and turned it into a binary discussion in which the side arguing in favor of freeing Pokemon was represented by comically evil villains who don't actually believe in their side of the argument. I think people would have had less of a problem with gen 5 trying to pull people into its story if it had a story worth telling. Outside of that many of the problems regarding difficulty are still present in gen 5. The 8th gym has fucking 3 Pokemon, hell you could have given him 4 by adding Hydreigon to Drayden's/Iris's roster and made it a doubles gym to strategize around a levitate + earthquake combo with Haxorus and Hydreigon. The elite four don't even get full teams until the postgame.

Gen 7 also has a shit story, Team Skull being a bunch of literal nobodies led to literally nowhere, I don't know why people think this is some kind of grounded reapproach to something like Team Rocket when Team Rocket was a fucking mafia syndicate that did more than commit petty crimes and had an active grip on the region instead of just being a bunch of lowlife punks. People have this parasocial relationship with cosmog and think getting the legendary Pokemon is more personal since it's been like a companion to you the whole game, except this isn't actually true and the fucker travels with Lillie the entire game. Lillie herself doesn't feel like much of a companion much like every other unique NPC closest in proximity to our character because most of hers and everybody elses journey takes place off screen. If there's any praise I can give of gen 7's story is that it didn't completely squander an interesting premise like gen 5 did.

If you're gonna have a more story driven game, is it that much to ask for those stories to be good, or at least interesting? Whenever I see people praising these games just for having a story it becomes so obvious that Pokemon is likely the only story based game they've ever played. Fucking 8 hour indie games have more story to them than anything Pokemon has tried to do over the past 2 decades, let alone the collections of 100+ hour RPG's like Xenoblade, SMT/Persona, Trails, and so on. Fucking Monster Hunter Stories 2 had a better executed plot and that games story is as by the books as it gets. Much like everything else Game Freak does, people praise them for trying to have a story, much like how X and Y get praise for trying to make a big jump into 3D, or trying to do open world, or trying to do anything somewhat ambitious that deviates from the same shit they've produced since 1996. Maybe Game Freak can get something out of me once they try and actually succeed at executing a novel idea, then I might consider giving them some of the participation medals people seem so keen on handing out.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Pokemon games always have shit story and characters, nobody plays them for that. It's the game mechanics and new Pokemon introduced that matter, and Gen 5/7 were at their peak. Gen 5 is the perfect sendoff to the 2D era of Pokemon and the last generation without Fairies, with a very interesting weather and power focused metagame. This was also the only game with gems, a feature I wish stayed in the game(there is only the normal gem in later games and it is nerfed).

Gen 7 threw the kitchen sink and let you just have everything: You want Megas? There you go. You want Z-Crystals? We have those, too. The crystals and megas breathed new life into some older mon and made almost every single one of them viable to a degree, that was also the last hurrah of Pokemon as a whole the way I see it. The only thing that was removed by this point were the crystals from Gen 5, but I didn't mind that too much since Z-Crystals are basically the gems but more balanced, so it's less of a case of them being removed and more that they were mechanically changed.

The new gens that limit movesets/Pokemon and lock most of the content behind DLCs just isn't the same, while I appreciate the idea of a limited metagame that will always be nothing more than a gimmick, I play these games to see how the older Pokemon change over time, as the gens move forward. Go watch some False Swipe Gaming videos on youtube and look up your favorite Pokemon, each and every single one almost has a narrative story to their competitive career, it gives them even more character and it's interesting to see how much the games really changed...and how little some of the Pokemon changed despite of that. If either Gen 5 or 7 removed any Pokemon or move from the roster, even if it wasn't natively found in their region, the metagame would be a lot worse, you would be surprised who makes a sudden comeback thanks to some peculiar circumstances.

Of course, you can't have any of that when you neuter the game from the get go for more money. A less morally and creatively bankrupt company would make two separate playlists: One that has only the region dex and allows only Dynamax/Gigantomax Pokemon, if we're talking about Gen 8(make that the rule for the first competitive tournament as well), and then a second playlist that has all the Pokemon, and allows Megas/Z-Crystals as well(Make this the second year tournament rules, when everyone has enough time to build up their PCs and get familiar with the game mechanics). Watch which one becomes more popular. Also, the tournament rules I mentioned? That's how VGC used to work, you would have regional dex one year and the national dex the one after that. What they had worked, they broke it to squeeze more money out of their customers.

At the end of the day, every single Pokemon game's campaign is aimed at kids, maybe aside from the Gamecube titles that seem to be aimed more at young teenagers, of course their story and characters will be simplistic, and their villains one note. Nobody plays them for that, even people who grind single player usually do so under Nuzlocke rules or other limitations, or they grind out shinies or breed perfect IV Pokemon. It's the collecting aspect and the core mechanics that make the franchise unique and THAT is where they fucked up. I don't care how shitty or bland a single player Pokemon game is as long as the former two are good, otherwise I wouldn't have made it thru XY, which is basically a prototype for the bland, nigger filled Sword and Shield years later(except even XY at least had some ambition to it, Sword and Shield's only ambition is in how much money the games can take from you for as little content as possible).

 

[Freelance Police]

At the end of the day, every single Pokemon game's campaign is aimed at kids, maybe aside from the Gamecube titles that seem to be aimed more at young teenagers, of course their story and characters will be simplistic, and their villains one note.

I don't have a problem with stories being simplistic or targeted at kids, it's absolutely possible to tell a simplistic story targeted towards kids and still be good and/or interesting. Pokemon as a franchise isn't even a stranger to this since Spike Chunsoft was able to pull it off with Red/Blue Rescue Team and Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky. What really baffles me with gen 5's story is that they picked such a complex topic of discussion in the context of the in-game world about the morality and ethics of catching Pokemon as if a child is going to have the capacity to engage with or process the arguments any of these people are making in any meaningful way.

Even one note characters aren't necessarily bad if they're executed well or are at least entertaining to watch, gen 7's story suffers a lot by trying to make the characters seem dimensional by attempting to get the players to sympathize with Lusamine's family situation (despite her being a fucking sociopath) or thinking character development is a sufficient condition to make characters interesting. It doesn't matter that Lillie becomes more confident by the end of gen 7, she still does fuck all and the only interesting thing about her is the legendary Pokemon hiding in her bag.

On the topic of the metagame I agree gen 5 had an interesting power struggle with the weather, but gen 7's meta was pretty fucking shit. Every team was running 2 or 3 tapus and a mega, which made a lot of matchups feel incredibly stale. Megas as a whole are a shit mechanic in terms of team building since you're dedicating a team slot to a small pool of Pokemon who can mega evolve (unless you're gimping yourself for fun) which results in less variety in team compositions. Power creeping mechanics and abilities are an incredibly lazy and uninteresting way to develop a metagame and gen 7 was the culmination of that before the absurdity of the Pokemon from gen 8 and especially gen 9.
Although I don't see the metagame as a big selling point for me, if I really wanted to play competitive Pokemon I can just play showdown. Pokemon has the potential to be mechanically interesting but Game Freak has never capitalized on these mechanics outside of the now MIA battle frontier. Instead of slowly introducing new mechanics and challenges through rival battles and gyms, they teach you how to play rock paper scissors 12 times. It doesn't matter how mechanically rich Pokemon is because game freak refuses to capitalize off it outside of competitive, which is still a high bar of entry and an enormous time sink if you plan on playing it legitimately.

Contrast this with a game like Persona which utilizes its much simpler battle system incredibly well in the sense that each fight contributes to the overall attrition of your SP and HP or Monster Hunter Stories which adapts the players ability to recognize and respond to monster attacks and behaviors like in the core series and rewards players with early access to stronger and rarer monsters for mastering the smaller nuanced mechanics to win against tougher optional fights, like party members being unable to fall below 1 hp when performing a double attack or while riding. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have games like Library of Ruina and Chrono Ark which are unabashedly open with their complex battle systems and challenges to create incredibly difficult but compelling gameplay. With Pokemon it's the worst of both worlds, you have a battle system with so much potential for interesting strategies and challenges, but instead every challenge boils down to rock paper scissors, except you already know your opponent is going to play scissors, so its just a matter of identifying which type is equivalent to playing rock. Repeat this 12 times until the champion fight. This design as well as the level curve being incredibly fucked leads to so many unfulfilling battles that are often trivialized by one Pokemon.

As much as I'd like to praise gen 5 opening up a lot of weather based synergy, Game Freak sure as fuck didn't utilize it in their main game. I'm not going to praise a game because it has the potential to be interesting outside of the core experience of the game as a whole that's only really gonna be tapped into by the niche group of people who play these games competitively. It doesn't make the lackluster characters, progression, and challenges any less terrible. I agree that the collection aspect is the only worthwhile thing the series has to offer now, but even that's been fucked up by cutting out Pokemon and making you store them on their shitty mobile app if you want to have any hope of importing your collections to future games, as well as the declining quality of the designs with shit like fucking Flamigo or retreading old designs for the umpteenth time so Weezing can have a stupid ass hat.

tl;dr pokemon been poopy bad for a while now and it make me not happy

 

[30+GameOvers]

On the topic of the metagame I agree gen 5 had an interesting power struggle with the weather, but gen 7's meta was pretty fucking shit. Every team was running 2 or 3 tapus and a mega, which made a lot of matchups feel incredibly stale. Megas as a whole are a shit mechanic in terms of team building since you're dedicating a team slot to a small pool of Pokemon who can mega evolve (unless you're gimping yourself for fun) which results in less variety in team compositions.

I disagree, that is a very shallow way of looking back at the S/M meta. Sure, Tapus and Megas were everywhere, but the counters for them were at an all time high. You had so many Pokemon that could kick their ass, even if they needed a Z-Crystal, and you are also forgetting we were introduced to Ultra Beasts as well. Very interesting Pokemon that had their extremes highlighted and focused on, making them either incredibly hard to faint or incredibly hard to stop them steamrolling you, especially when Beast Boosts started rolling in. Honorary mention goes to Ash-Greninja, who is kind of like an Ultra Beast thanks to it's stat spread and the enormous stat boost when it gets a KO. You had to look deeper to make sure you weren't running the same set as everybody else, but then again
S/M was hard to get into, as the meta Pokemon were incredibly easy to use and could easily defeat an unprepared team. Once you dived deeper into it, there was more variety and choices than any other Pokemon game to date. Reminds me of Gen 4, when so many Pokemon became viable again with Physical/Special split and the plethora of new moves and items that made the game so much more tactical and faster than ADV metagame. S/M did something similar.
It is a shame that competitive seasons don't last at all before we move on to the next game, there is new strategies and teams made even for Gold/Silver and Red/Blue today so it's not like the game doesn't have even more depth than we thought if you don't give it a chance. If you look at False Swipe Gaming videos, one theme you will notice with Gen 5 sections is that many strategies, bans or sets were only found years after the games released since the metagame was so short lived for Gen 5, players barely scratched the surface when the games were actually played online.

 

[Anonitolia]

This was also the only game with gems, a feature I wish stayed in the game(there is only the normal gem in later games and it is nerfed).

The only thing that was removed by this point were the crystals from Gen 5

That's how VGC used to work

every single Pokémon game's campaign is aimed at kids

Nobody plays them for that

It would have taken you 5 seconds to search up whether typed gems were still in generations newer than 5 before you made this post. Or another 10 to confirm that VGC still does regional dex -> national dex (to the best of their abilities given the current situation of the games). But you didn't. So it's no surprise that you're also retarded enough to think that most people play Pokémon mostly for competitive reasons.

 

[Catgirl Tyranid]

Lmao.

 

[I_Lurk_Here]

Lmao.

Is the site supposed to be broken?

 

[Catgirl Tyranid]

Is the site supposed to be broken?
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I'm not going to explain. Reread my post including what's actually in the screenshots and think REALLY hard for a minute or two.

Edit: I'm a dumbass.

 

[I_Lurk_Here]

I'm not going to explain. Reread my post including what's actually in the screenshots and think REALLY hard for a minute or two.

Tranny Jannies try to do an April fool's prank and end up breaking a bit more than xhey expected?

 

[Catgirl Tyranid]

Tranny Jannies try to do an April fool's prank and end up breaking a bit more than xhey expected?

I apparently need to practice what I preach, Lol.

Just checked, the Quilava & Totadile pages before and after are fine. Did you stumble on an extremely specific page error or is it more wide spread.

 

[I_Lurk_Here]

I apparently need to practice what I preach, Lol.

Just checked, the Quilava & Totadile pages before and after are fine. Did you stumble on an extremely specific page error or is it more wide spread.

I've seen it also on the pages for Paras and Wigglytuff.

 

[Sneak 'n' Snore]

Is the site supposed to be broken?
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Poor Larry, this is going to cost him one of his multiple sidejobs.