#it brought me around to liking overworld pokemon. which i was always against!

[protagonistheavy]

Shitblast about the Pokemon Presentation incoming:

That sucked the life out of me to be totally, un-exaggeratedly honest. It sucked pretty much any care I could have about Pokemon for a good couple of years at least. The downward slant of the franchise is just ridiculously obvious, and genuinely I don’t think I want to buy into the series anymore -- I’ve gotten burned enough times to not even try and get hyped for anything as ugly as the DP remakes or Legends.

Before I even get into the games they talked about, I just want to rag on that opening video thing. The huge montage of all the different things the pokemon franchise has, uh, infected I guess. Am I the only one that was really, really put-off by this? It just seemed like such a huge ass pat for themselves, like, “woo-hoo, look at our millions of dollars we spent on NOT the video games.” And it’s not even structured in some kind of catchy song, it’s just people chanting out hashtags that pop up on screen. It’s so cheaply made and they do shit like this pretty much every fucking year, I’m sorry but I just found this whole thing to be a waste of time. It didn’t get me hyped for anything to come, that’s for sure, it just reminded me that I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for Pokemon to actually progress itself and catch up with a modern market.

Pokemon Snap was the only cool thing from the presentation, and that’s a game we’ve already known about and is honestly too simple to fail. They would have to REALLY fuck up a game as straightforward as Snap. And this presentation didn’t bring any exciting new light to the game, just confirming that yes, yes you will indeed be taking pictures of pokemon, and then sharing those pictures with friends. Everything they’ve talked about is just the natural modernizations I’d expect from any game claiming to be about photography and made in 2021. The most exciting thing they could show off was the illumination item thing, which is just sorta, okay I guess.

The DP remake was disheartening. I honestly wish they didn’t even bother, and just ported the game as-it-was to the Switch.

I hate these graphics. And no, no it’s not some “style.” This isn’t a stylistic choice, this isn’t a “theme,” whatever this toddler’s toy aesthetic is supposed to be. It isn’t. It’s a budget constraint -- it’s a compromise. And I honestly hate that people are trying to defend it as some sort of art style, when I know 100% they would never defend another game like this nearly as hard. They would look at ANY game with graphics this shit and call it out.

There’s this excuse that it’s an art style theme, akin to Link’s Awakening remake on the Switch. Except, did people forget that Link’s Awakening actually looked good? Because it was actually designed to look like everything was a miniature. They used proper shading and texturing to sell that aesthetic, to make it look pleasing to the eye. Link’s Awakening is proud of its graphics and it does as much as it can visually to lean on that aesthetic. These DP remakes? There’s no heart put into this “art direction” at all. The textures are all plastic and flat and even downright muddy -- compare any screenshot of the remake to an original location and you’ll see how awful the colors are now, and how vague some of the models are after having been transformed from sprites. There’s no intent at all from the devs to actually include the polish necessary to make this style work -- it’s not an art style decision, it’s a budget constraint. They chose this design for the game because it would be easy to make, even easier to animate, and they could then justify slapping both of these games with $60 price tags. And yeah I get it -- “we don’t know how much these games are going to be!” -- no we do, it’s going to be fucking $60 like anything else released on the Switch, but if you seriously think this is worth $50 or even $40, then whatever, spend your damn money.

And yeah I am bitter that this is against precedent of the previous remakes. Every other remake before this had the time taken to update the graphics and direction to modern standards, and every remake was better because of it. It was refreshing to revisit these older worlds with modern sensibilities and an updated perspective -- the whole appeal of updating these older games is to give them the love and depth that technology at the time wouldn’t allow. At least that’s the appeal for me, I guess there’s a LOT of people out there whose appeal to Pokemon as a franchise is just buying whatever fucking comes out next and just mashing that A button into a state of satisfaction. This bums me out so bad that instead of getting something with passion and care, we get the absolute cheapest output; a remake that doesn’t promise anything new or exciting, burdened with absolute shit graphics.

And again, this style just sucks. It isn’t cute lol. I guess some people are gonna be into it, that’s fine I guess, but wow I don’t believe a single person that claims “this is what I imagined DP to be like.” No you didn’t, fuck the shut up? You’re really going to tell me that, in your most immersed state of playing this game, you imagined everything to be these fucking toddler toys? Okay you’re just on your own for that one -- I and every other normal human did not think of the DP world as some chibi fantasyland full of lego people. I hate that this is even excused as being some sort of “hark back” to the older art style -- the older art style wasn’t toy-themed or plastic-themed! What the fuck are people trying to pull here? It’s such a shame that DP had amazing sprite work and a wonderful world and an enticing story, but its remake is just going to underplay all of that, abandon it all just so it can have some gimmicky art style -- at best it’s a gimmicky art style riding the coattails of Link’s Awakening, and at worst it’s a budget cut done to make the game as cheap as possible to shit out.

I’m so disappointed in this. I was really looking forward to experiencing DP as a remake, I’ve never played this generation before. I wanted to play the remakes because I didn’t want to adapt to the older logic of the games, and I wanted to be able to bring in my own pokemon, have my own adventure. I wanted another experience like ORAS or HGSS. I didn’t want to go through the work of trying to play the original in a reasonable way. But since this is the direction of the remake, to make it look cheap as hell and totally heartless, then I’m just forced to play the original, and that sucks on a lot of layers.

And then Legends of Arceus or whatever.

Look. I want to like this game. And realistically I do like the idea of this game. But just like the DP remake, it looks like it’s the absolute cheapest response to what fans have been asking for, and it looks like it just wants to ride off the success of another, better franchise. I’ll make a wish now that I hope this game proves to be so much better than it looks in this presentation.

But wow, wow. I don’t think that’s going to happen. This looks like full-on garbage.

I wanted a BotW-like Pokemon game ever since, well, BotW. I think an open-world format would do wonders for the Pokemon formula, and SwSh had potential with its Wild Areas. But again, all the cheapest choices have been made. This game reeks of developers being told that fans want a BotW-styled Pokemon game, and then responding by just inserting pokemon assets into a beta test world of BotW. They didn’t show anything that looked promising for Pokemon gameplay, they just showed elements that are enough to convince an audience, “trust us, this is an open-world, with open-world mechanics -- like stealth! Rolling into bushes! Isn’t that cool? Isn’t this how you want to catch pokemon?”

It’s heartless. The developers clearly don’t care about making an open-world pokemon game; they’re interested in making pokemon an open-world game, the difference being that they don’t care about actually organically mixing the two. It’s just going to be a slop of open-world mechanics, set in an open-world that has no reason to be explored and is ugly as sin to look at, with mechanics designed to slow you down and fill in that 40-60 hour expectation. And I say this with as much confidence as I do because if they did have anything interesting to mention about Legends, they would have fucking said it -- they would have highlighted where pokemon gameplay intercepts open-world gameplay in a meaningful way, they would have brought attention to new mechanics that could only work in an open-world pokemon game.

They didn’t. They showed off a player character rolling into some bushes, and manually throwing a pokeball.

And that’s just the gameplay. Can’t we all agree this game is visual vomit? Just utterly fucking terrible to look at? There are literally fangames with SUCH better graphics. And there’s no excuse here like “oh it doesn’t LOOK like shit, looking-like-shit is its aesthetic!” No it just looks terrible on every level. The textures are so fucking muddy and stretched. The terrain is cobbled together and without inspiration; flat fields, angular hills, and randomly placed trees and bushes, all of which are rendered so badly that you can always see how 2D they are. The player models are uncomfortably stiff and expressionless. And the pokemon? The fucking pokemon?

Why do the pokemon look so fucking ugly? What’s the goddamn excuse? We see pokemon in the overworld, moving around and prancing about -- and they’re animated at like ten frames per second. That’s being generous! These pokemon look like they had three frames of animation to swap between! What the fuck is this?! Sword and Shield have overworld pokemon running around, and those didn’t need significant frame cuts! So how the hell did they manage to stumble so far backwards?! Why is this even a fucking challenge...?!?! Why do I have to be gaslit to believe that video games can’t do more than this? There are so many games doing so much, so much fucking more in even just one second of gameplay. So many games with intense graphics, explosive effects, tons of enemies and players on-screen, all this happening at once... sometimes online... and yet Pokemon still can’t even animate a fucking monkey dancing around in an empty field. What the fuck is the excuse here? How can they honestly show off this gameplay footage and feel proud of their work, without at least saying something like, “This is early-as-fuck test footage of the game, this is like one week into development, this is why it looks so ugly and unpolished.”

You know those throwaway junk games on Steam? That sell for like three or five dollars, and it’s just a really terrible FPS set in a generic wasteland environment? Yeah THOSE games look ten times better than this shit. There are so many pokemon fangames that exist that do this exact concept but DON’T look like utter garbage on the eyes at the same time. It’s baffling -- why is it so difficult for them to not make an ugly-as-sin game? Why does it have to be this way? How can the Switch host a game like BotW or Mario Odyssey but it can’t fucking handle Pokemon?

And this idea doesn’t even sound fun, the concept of being in the “ancient past” of the Sinnoh region just isn’t what I wanted. When I wanted an open-world Pokemon game, I expected it to be... you know, pokemon! I expected gyms or some kind of equivalent, I imagined it having modern sensibilities... But instead it’s this really gimmicky concept, because I guess the devs can’t possibly imagine the normal pokemon world even possibly engaging with something new and different -- no, we have to go to effectively a whole other planet just to let players have pokemon in an open world.

Ultimately these games are fucking disgusting to look at and it’s so disappointing to see them in this state. The DP remakes chose a cheap art style not because they thought it complemented Sinnoh or its story, but because it was the bare minimum to making the game and justifying a $60 price tag. Legends of Arceus has potential, but it’s showing right off the bat that it doesn’t have the manpower or passion behind it to actually live up to it, making it just another cash grab that relies on chasing the coattails of a more successful franchise. And both seem like insulting cheap answers to the two things die-hard pokemon fans have been asking for, making this situation all the worse.

The Pokemon Company doesn’t care, and neither do I anymore. I genuinely don’t see myself playing another pokemon game. It’s so sad because these games are full of potential, and a long-term commitment is obviously one of its appeals. But if this is the direction of the franchise, then fuck me. I don’t want to support ugly-as-hell spinoffs that exist only to shut up the fanbase, I hate how Sword and Shield came out and I hated how scummy the DLC was to add onto it. This series is blatantly trying to rob players by producing as absolute little as possible, they want to make money out of nothing, and I’m not coughing up that money anymore. This is ridiculous. Sword and Shield being so disappointing was one thing... the DLC being cashgrabs for material that should’ve just been post-game content was mind-numbing... but these two games looking like total garbage is on another level. It’s beyond disappointing; it’s insulting that they would even bother making these games with as little heart as they are, so clearly and obviously making games that they know players will shell out cash for regardless of its quality.

I hope the fanbase really matures and wisens up to this because that’s why we’re in this mess. You’re allowed to enjoy this “art style” of the DP remakes, you’re allowed to be hyped for the new gameplay of Legends... but please, for the love of god, have some higher standards than this. Please look at what other game companies can do with their games, and how much they charge, and how much fulfillment and content is in those games. We need to expect more from the literal most-profitable franchise of all time -- they have the resources, they have the capabilities, they choose to be lazy so that they can get as much money out of us as possible. It’s got to be put to an end. Please ask for more from these games. Please don’t settle for these games “because at least they’re still pokemon,” “because at least the pokemon battles are the same,” “because at least the older games are still technically playable.”

After all this, I just don’t believe Pokemon anymore when it tries to sell itself “to everybody.” That’s just plain not true. Their core audience is the dumbest of 10 year-olds and the dumbest of die-hard fans. They don’t care about their community any deeper than their wallets.

[sage-nebula]

Do you find Pokémon Speak to be cute or annoying? How do feel about Origins and Generations getting rid of it, or fanfics where the Pokémon just straight-up talk?

Origins is dead to me. I don’t care about that series at all, and thus it never factors into anything ever, consideration-wise. So, up front, I’m not going to address Origins because I really don’t like it.

As far as pokémon-speak goes, in general I don’t mind it. Like, I don’t think that “cute” or “annoying” should be my only two options, because I don’t associate either one of those words with it. It’s … it simply is. I mean, you have to understand, I was eight years old when Pokémon was first brought to the States, and that’s when I got into the series. So I’ve been used to pokémon speak for close to twenty years now. I’ve been used to it for the vast majority of my life. So it’s not really about finding it “cute” or “annoying”; it’s about accepting it as a thing that is, as a fact. It just … is, as much as birds sing or cows moo in our world.

With that said, it makes sense that it wouldn’t feature in Generations, because it doesn’t feature in the games for the most part (there are times when you can talk to a pokémon on the overworld and their speech bubble will reflect pokémon speech, and starting in Gen VI they gave Ōtani Ikue’s voice clips back to Pikachu, which previously hadn’t been done since Yellow Version). Generations is a series that follows the games, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t feature pokemon speak, since that was a creation of the primary anime series. So I don’t mind that it wasn’t included there, because anime canon is not what they were concerned with.

As far as fanfics go, unless you’re writing Team Rocket’s Meowth or a legendary pokémon that has shown that they have the ability to communicate in human languages telepathically, you should not have them straight up talk. Pokémon are not digimon. By and large, while they understand human speech, they do not have the ability to replicate it. Again, it’s different if you’re writing Team Rocket’s Meowth or a legendary pokémon like Mewtwo that has, in canon, shown the ability to communicate with human speech telepathically; but if you aren’t, then you shouldn’t have the pokémon talk. They can’t do that. You need to respect what they are as a species.

With that said, sometimes it can be tricky to know how to translate pokémon speech over. Some pokémon, such as charizard, don’t communicate via their names; they talk in growls, in croons, in cries, in snarls. And this can be a bit tricky, because some of these words carry connotations that might not be exactly what the charizard in question is going for. So you do have to be a bit careful with that. There are also cases where the pokémon’s trainer can understand them, to varying degrees. For instance, we’ve seen that Alan fully understands what Lizardon is saying, and can even tell what Lizardon is feeling without Lizardon having to say anything at all, so in those cases you can write in a line of “normal” speech … so long as you make it clear that Lizardon is still growling / crooning / what-have-you, and that Alan is interpreting what Lizardon is saying. Such as:

“Thanks, Lizardon,” he mumbled, and Lizardon sat back on his haunches, transferring his claw to Alan’s hair instead. “Sorry about that.”

Lizardon loosed another low rumble—don’t worry about it, in Charizardese—and Alan scrubbed his hands up over his face, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes.

Or:

Once he had finished dressing (a feat that was slightly easier now that he had medicine to dull the pain), he pulled Lizardon’s pokéball out of his pocket and turned back to face his best friend.

“Ready to go train?” he asked. Lizardon gave Alan a look and small snort (‘Only if you are’), and Alan gave him a wan smile in response.

“I always am,” he said, and Lizardon’s expression shifted to a clear, ‘Yeah, I know’ before Alan recalled him, and slipped his pokéball back into his pants pocket. After a moment of thought, he tucked the bottle of painkillers in the pocket on the other side.

Or:

“I can’t … believe it,” he said, and he spun back around to face Lizardon—Lizardon, whom he now had to look up at in order to meet his eyes, whose tail was now so large it looked like it could easily uproot a tree (at least partially) if he gave it a good smack. “You … you evolved. You evolved, Lizardon, you evolved …” He blinked, and if he had felt breathless before, it was nothing compared to how he felt now as a new realization ignited in his mind. “… to save me?”Lizardon crooned an affirmation, and bumped his snout against Alan’s forehead in a quick kiss. Alan huffed a laugh, dizzy less from the sudden fall and more from the exhilaration of everything that had just happened, and placed both of his hands on either side of Lizardon’s head so that he could tug him down to eye level.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’re the best partner I could ever ask for, you know that?”

Lizardon snorted as if to say ‘like you have to ask,’ and his hot breath ruffled Alan’s hair. Alan laughed again, and that brought a reptilian smile to Lizardon’s own lips as he bumped his head into the crook of Alan’s neck in an unspoken request for a better hug.

Having a charizard blatantly speak the human language is a no-no, but in this case, we’ve seen in canon that Alan very clearly has perfect understanding when it comes to communication with Lizardon (they have actual conversations in canon), and as such “translating” Lizardon’s speech like this is fine so long as you make it evident that he’s still rumbling / crooning / whatever, rather than actually talking. Similarly, Pikachu’s dialogue should always be written in pikaspeak, but it’s evident that Ash understands Pikachu perfectly now (though there was a learning curve in the beginning), and as such having Pikachu and Ash converse—with narration from Ash’s perspective translating the pikaspeak, if Ash’s responses don’t make it clear enough—is permissible. This of course doesn’t apply to every trainer and pokémon combo, but for ones like these? Yes.

So by and large I just accept pokémon speak as a Thing That Is, but you have to pay a bit of attention to which pokémon actually employ it, and it does take some care and consideration when writing (as anything does). But I don’t mind that Generations didn’t include it, because by and large the games don’t. It’s an anime canon thing, and that’s fine, too.