this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Honestly the main reason the discourse around this game is annoying is that the whole idea of an edgy version of pokemon is juvenile as hell, but people are instead moralizing about stealing from fucking nintendo
It's sad too because I don't want edginess, I want Nintendo to just explore Pokemon like they're living creatures.
The worldbuilding is so shallow and the Pokedex entries don't make sense. And the new Pokemon roll out to replace the old ones (hate that it's called dexit).
It's frustrating to think about the proposed ideology of Pokemon about stewardship, compassion, and working together when the franchise itself is just that, a franchise.
Tangential to that, it always annoyed me growing up with the media and the games that key to all the stories is the idea of individual pokemon actually being important and growing meaningfully as part of a largely static team, but in the games they're just disposable type, stat, and move pools that get switched out or binned indefinitely and your static team at the end is a bunch of stuff you caught in the last fifth of the game or less. The one, singular exception to that in my experience was when I caught a shiny vulpix in one of the gym challenges in Sword (of all places), and that became my sweeper for the entire rest of the game and both DLCs, but that's the most edge case of all edge cases being something that was insanely rare and special in its own right, that was also a very strong and viable pokemon, with nearly perfect stats on top of that.
Like there's a huge disconnect between the sort of collecting gameplay and the story about growth and whatnot, since you're basically playing a looter shooter and the pokemon are just new weapon rolls to be evaluated and kept or tossed, and none of the franchise's mechanical attempts at fixing this have worked because they're always just limited gimmicks that can't get in the way of that core looter-shooter progression loop.
Consequently, I've always wanted to see something where a given pokemon's progression is more fluid and has higher peaks than just "this is a one stage low-stat trash mon and that's all it will ever be, bin" or "this has one mid-tier evolution that comes super early, good early game bruiser and then trash as soon as something better comes along," as long as you actually invest in it and keep it around. But I don't think Pokemon could ever do something like that, because that turns it into an RPG where pokemon are mechanically characters instead of weapons and the evolutions or whatever are like classes they prestige into instead of fixed forms.
That's on you, Pokemon games are generally pretty easy and you can beat them with most any party. I beat gold with pretty much just my feraligator because I was a dumb kid who didn't level anyone else.
That's true, but the games are designed with the intention for players to replace Pokemon in your roster. The anime did it too, with Ash changing out his team between regions and only occasionally revisiting them.
There's a level of disposability baked into the series.