#the national dex is unsustainable now

[friskibitz]

you ever think about how the pokemon company fucked up the one shot at real sinnoh remakes

[gikairan]

I’m going to ramble a bit about Pokemon SwSh now

My one main complaint about SwSh was always that... it felt like it took a step backwards from the 3DS generation in some ways? With each generation, the stories have been getting more and more complicated, with more cinematic content and other cutscenes. But SwSh really... took a step back on that content, while the main gameplay itself kinda played very similarly. Out of the Wild area, and wild pokemon being visible, the game was very much the same as it has been since the initial jump to 3D. 

But none of this is a “gamefreak is lazy and giving us a barebones game!!” thing as some people seem to think it is?  Its that gamefreak clearly put their manhours into actually... making the rest of the game??? Like, at no point would gamefreaks employees been sitting idle and under utilised. They were probably crunching like just about any other developer in the industry.  Its just that the ideas that Gamefreak had for the next generation of Pokemon were so vast, they straight up didn’t have the manhours to dedicate to much else? Like, the Dynamax raids are an entirely new concept that they had to completely make from scratch?? The Wild area probably took so much of their time. Like, Gamefreak has never had a moving camera in a pokemon game before, and thats just one of the little systems they had to build for the Wild area to work. 

Like, I can recognise that there was a lot of work put into this game, but other areas had to suffer for it all to work. And I’d rather Gamefreak got the actual core concepts of the game working as well as they did (though some places could be smoother?) rather than adding in more story elements. 

And the more of the DLC I play, the more you can see that Gamefreak are WAY more confident in the tools they’ve created. They don’t need to spend so much time actually building the game and so they can start to actually make things more interesting.  The Isle of Armour made a new Wild area that was infinitely more interesting to explore. It didn’t feel like one single field across different elevations with a handful of different biomes. There were new biomes too with a lot more texturing on the floor as well as caves being added And my short time with The Crown Tundra has shown theyve made an even crazier wild area. It feels SO much bigger. I got lost in a seriously complicated cave for ages. Theres a small town in it, and theres no loading screens between wilderness and town. So for the first time... you can move your camera in a settlement! And... theyve placed the houses around that! Yes, its tiny. But it feels more like a leap forward for the series than anything else so far.  I’ll reserve opinion on the story content until I’ve actually finished the DLC, but so far its definitely feeling a lot more involved than the main game.

I definitely think whatever the next main Pokemon game will be, it’ll be a lot better. Gamefreak have made their Switch engine now, so they can spend a lot less manhours on the core systems that make the game work and more on the fun stuff. The DLC has shown a consistent trend of improvement that leads me to being optimistic about the next main game

....... Except the National Dex will never return. That had to be cut one day, and SwSh just happened to be the game where it was cut. Unfortunately, adding 100+ pokemon every few years was eventually going to become unsustainable. Especially if the models continually had to be remade for newer formats. Please, stop going on about it being cut. Its not going to come back.