I think the perspective changed over time, I mean. At the time it was really negative, but nowadays I almost always hear praise for it, especially as it was a bold decision.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
Even gen 1. "It's just a passing fad."
I mean I agree with this, I've even said something similar in the past. It's just also something I account for because well, it does matter to public reception.
My experience with Pokemon/nostalgia is that I grew up on Gen 5 and then played 4 a bit after, and in general I did enjoy them at the time. But I remember being upset that I couldn't catch Pikachu even when I think some ad shows the player having Pikachu around Castelia City or something. I love B2W2 but find BW to be not the best in the series, if I'm honest. But I've always been aggressively against riding my own nostalgia in ways that some would find to be bad (I literally will not allow myself to value something higher because I played it as a kid).
Personally I read these cycles for around 10 years. The kids when Gen 1 came out were young adults when Gen 5 came out. The kids when Gen 5 came out are young adults now. It's something I don't really like because it means that everything seems to be in flux, but consistency is just never gonna happen I suppose, and maybe that's a good thing.
Having nostalgia to something mid by itself isn’t a bad thing, and more power to those who genuinely enjoys the game, comic, movie or what else they grew up with. It’s only when they started to defend both the good and bad thing about the stuff they grow up with that it becomes a severe issue as it comes off as insecure and disingenuous, and it can turn into a vicious cycle within a fandom with a vicious debate of which generation is the best one, to the point some fans called the current the worst one yet only to swiftly change their mind, and vice versa.
I have yet to see a fandom that were a bigger culprit than Pokémon, even beyond the game side of the community. I do not think not even the Sonic fandom, Dragon Ball fandom, FNAF fandom or other noteworthy fandoms were even close about it. While Kanto is pretty much “patient zero” regarding several Kanto fans, it is safe to say that many Gen 2-7 fans are also victim to their own fallacies even before the whole Dexit situation, and something tells me it might also happen to many Gen 8 + 9 fans as well.
I have yet to see a fandom that were a bigger culprit than Pokémon, even beyond the game side of the community. I do not think not even the Sonic fandom, Dragon Ball fandom, FNAF fandom or other noteworthy fandoms were even close about it. While Kanto is pretty much “patient zero” regarding several Kanto fans, it is safe to say that many Gen 2-7 fans are also victim to their own fallacies even before the whole Dexit situation, and something tells me it might also happen to many Gen 8 + 9 fans as well.
I have personally found the opposite (not that Pokemon isn’t bad in this regard, but there are many others just as or worse)
Nostalgitis is an illness that pokemon fandom has the most cases in and it is staggering! Which generation you grew up with will grow within you a bias that's hard to dismiss. I see this with pokemon fans who grew up with any of the nine regions of the Franchise.
Hearing another individual Dissing something you grew up with pains anyone, but with pokemon fans it strikes a harder chord than any piece of nostalgic media. Harder than music/ toys, but probably not as much as cartoons...
This is my 6th year as a pokemon fan. I bought pokemon sun as my first poke game as my sister and I had pooled our money on this game and Kirby Triple Deluxe. We shared that file and we had fun playing it, enjoyed the characters as we did while also watching the SM anime (except for Hau, we hated him even back then).
Good times, right? Well that was until dexit rolled around and the fandom was turned on its head. An Era we are all too familiar with. People started to pin Gen 8 on the downfall of the franchise and lumped Gen 6/7 in on there because they shared the same 3d problem. This was the time I started to stabilize myself in internet forums. I started to grow a great hatred of the people who'd make reductionist claims of SM being bad because "cutscenes". By extension, I hated those videos of the claims that the pokemon franchise is "dead". Hated gireum. Hated Distant Kingdom. Hated all of the #BBND zealots who fought against pokemon as if they hated the entire series. It made me think as if all pokemon fans were this way, and it made me hate even more. Around like late 2022-23. I stopped.
I realized that I was becoming who I hated.
It is never nice to generalize fandoms as intrinsically evil because of a few bad eggs.
Whether or not you get mad at someone who likes or dislikes a certain region or game, don't demonize them. They have a favorite gen too and would get mad if you did the same. Hate begets hate. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind as mahatma Gandhi said.
Appreciate the franchise for what it is. Not for what it hadn't done right that one time whether it be level curves, cutscenes, or too much HMS
Nah, Sonic's is pretty aggressive because both fans and critics after Sonic was no longer 1st party went ape shit in nostalgia bias. Rom hacking forums even before 2001 was already toxified cuz of bitterness of the 32x and Saturn failing
...come to think of it so were Pokemon's rom hacking forums before FRLG was out. Lotta attempts to recreate Kanto given Pokemania died mid Gen 2/early 3. You know what, retro fandom internet forums suck
Is Giovanni the most underwhelming gym leader of all time?
Ground is one of the least optimal types that a gym leader can specialize in for gen 1, and it becomes even less optimal for a late-game boss specifically. It's disadvantaged against all 3 starters. (Venusaur and Blastoise shred it; Charizard has ground immunity.) FRLG fleshes out the movesets slightly compared to gen 1 but counteracts that by bafflingly de-evolving his Rhydon.
When you look at the 8th gym leader for any other region, they often either specialize in a "strong" type like Dragon or are thematically fitting for their region (Water for Hoenn). And even when that isn't the case, I can't think of one that's set up to be so easily and universally bulldozed.
Ground is one of the least optimal types that a gym leader can specialize in for gen 1, and it becomes even less optimal for a late-game boss specifically. It's disadvantaged against all 3 starters. (Venusaur and Blastoise shred it; Charizard has ground immunity.) FRLG fleshes out the movesets slightly compared to gen 1 but counteracts that by bafflingly de-evolving his Rhydon.
When you look at the 8th gym leader for any other region, they often either specialize in a "strong" type like Dragon or are thematically fitting for their region (Water for Hoenn). And even when that isn't the case, I can't think of one that's set up to be so easily and universally bulldozed.
Yes, because of the buildup. If Giovanni was just an average gym leader, nothing special about him, then he would be slightly underwhelming, but not the most underwhelming I believe (idk what would be the most underwhelming otherwise). However, this is not just an average gym leader, this is the leader of Team Rocket, the evil organisation that you have been contesting with for a while. You have faced him two times before, once at the Game Corner and once at Silph Co. (i don't think there was a third time). Team Rocket you have had multiple encounters with and revealing that the Gym Leader is Team Rocket's leader should make for a hype match.
And then you click surf and win.
Yeah, literally one of the easiest battles in the game. Even if they had optimised movesets, the team is just so bad. In Pokemon Yellow they gave him a Persian, which had autocrit slash which was really cool, but the team is still so bad, and they revert it for every other battle. Ground types in Gen 1 are slow, with the exception of dugtrio who hits limply. Fun fact, in RB none of his mons have a rock type move, in Yellow only Rhydon does and in FRLG the two rhyhorns only have rock blast, so flying types eat them up which you will have on your team because fly is really good. It's honestly pathetic.
One thing I think they should have done is included Kangaskhan (and Persian maybe) in the final team. He uses it in both prior battles, and with something like Shadow Ball or E-quake, it could have been a threat. E-quake would especially make sense since that's the TM he gives out.
Giovanni is the one gym leader that could have broken the rule of "only one type" that gym leaders stick to religiously (which is a bad thing, Volkner in DP is proof that you can make these teams work, though DP also shows how not to do that in Flint) due to him being a mob boss, but they refused once again because they wanted it to be all ground.
Yung Dramps
awesome gaming
Said it before and will say it again: Most if not all of the attempts at "serious" Pokemon villains should've cheated. I can buy maybe a couple of them having honor codes, or someone like Guzma wanting to prevail fair and square as a pride thing, but Ghetsis? Lysandre? Cyrus? These are people with such degrees of ruthless megalomania and the resources to build all sorts of machines to tip the odds in their party's favor that them not doing so makes them feel weak.
I guess this is just part of my broader hot take that none of these aforementioned "serious" villains other than Guzma and Lusamine are all that good in the games. Giovanni is underwritten because he's a Game Boy game character, Maxie and Archie are ???, Cyrus and Lysandre are attempts at sympathetic villains in a setting too utopian and devoid of systemic problems to give their beliefs any weight and Ghetsis is just there for Game Freak to pull the ol' Umbara arc bait-and-switch and go "No no no, don't worry, there's no actual moral conflict with difficult questions being raised, the antagonists are just ontologically evil!". A lot of this could be forgiven if they were at least threats in a gameplay sense, but again other than Ghetsis and maybe Platinum Cyrus this is not the case for any of them. I've joked about this in other threads but it is legitimately embarrassing that Penny, the schoolgirl antagonist of a low-stakes bullying story with a joke Eeveelution spam crew is the only team leader besides Ghetsis to actually muster a team of 6.
Is this even a hot take? I dunno.
I guess this is just part of my broader hot take that none of these aforementioned "serious" villains other than Guzma and Lusamine are all that good in the games. Giovanni is underwritten because he's a Game Boy game character, Maxie and Archie are ???, Cyrus and Lysandre are attempts at sympathetic villains in a setting too utopian and devoid of systemic problems to give their beliefs any weight and Ghetsis is just there for Game Freak to pull the ol' Umbara arc bait-and-switch and go "No no no, don't worry, there's no actual moral conflict with difficult questions being raised, the antagonists are just ontologically evil!". A lot of this could be forgiven if they were at least threats in a gameplay sense, but again other than Ghetsis and maybe Platinum Cyrus this is not the case for any of them. I've joked about this in other threads but it is legitimately embarrassing that Penny, the schoolgirl antagonist of a low-stakes bullying story with a joke Eeveelution spam crew is the only team leader besides Ghetsis to actually muster a team of 6.
Is this even a hot take? I dunno.
In Cyrus' case it just seemed that he had such a god complex that he felt he didn't need to do more.
On the above, though, one angle I always kind of wanted to see the villains take was to wrestle control of some fundamental aspect of the game world and really wreck how it plays out for the player. Like, the crux of Team Rocket's plan in RBY was to take over Silph Co and get unrestricted access to stuff like Master Ball tech, right? Take that a step further and have the regional mob take over something like the Pokemon Centers or the PC storage network and actually restrict the player from freely utilizing them in the meantime. It's like the most straightforward way I can think of to demonstrate a threat: actually prevent the player or the other world inhabitants of being able to conduct business as usual while they reap the spoils.
Pokemon has always been pretty bad when it comes to gameplay/story dissonance like this. Like you said, shackling the villains under so many in-universe gameplay rules prevents them from ever being truly threatening. And it's always been kind of a farce for characters like Prof Oak to say things like "you won because you treat your Pokemon with love" because pretty much nothing that you actually do throughout the course of the game demonstrates it.
Villains in pokemon should cheat. They're too much of haters to comply by pokemon league guidelines. Why do the evil team grunts and leaders even pay you after they lost??? They're trying to take over the world and they fund their biggest opp, the protag??? What are these guys thinking?
I can imagine some rocket grunts secretly throwing X Items at giovannis Pokémon when he sends them out, effectively giving them totem pokemon-like buffs
You think you're going to take down this nidoking with a surf? NO. That one grunt snuck in an X Special defense when you were not looking. Now your vaporeon is not only not killing but also she will get hit with a thunder punch!
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Lusamine cheating in the context of the actual worldbuilding is cool. It still uses Pokemon mechanics and feels merited. In her first battle at Aether, it's pretty vanilla though she has a pretty strong team. And then when you fight her again she has Totem aura boosts + she is this Pokemon fusion meaning that it is more hands on, it's not cheating but it is her using the largest extent of her power at the time.
Shadow Ball is a gen 2 move.
As someone who only recently played Gen 1 starting a few years ago and have been playing it a lot to study its game design, Giovanni's choice of team as the final Gym Leader honestly puzzles me beyond "they're strong in a vacuum". I'm not sure what they were thinking from both a gameplay and storytelling point of view with this.
He has some decent Pokemon in a vacuum with Dugtrio and the Nidos, one being fast and the two being relatively strong and bulky...and his ace is a Rhydon. Which is sorta understandable since Rhydon has 440 BST which in Gen 1 context is very high and it's one of the latest evolving Pokemon, so its whole deal is basically "it's strong af". Unfortunately it has the exact same type as the very first Gym Leader's ace, Onix, so anyone who faces Rhydon at this point knows how to deal with it...hypothetically speaking. I'm not sure how exactly it's supposed to pose a serious threat to the player as a final roadblock.
Although I guess just "being strong" was good enough to them when they made his ace Rhydon. Since Rhydon had very high BST in the context of Gen 1 they figured "why not?", and it's big, strong, and looks threatening so it looks like a cool late game boss.
*Looks at Korrina*
Giovanni could've worked, but they didn't seem to really be able to make custom movesets. He desperately needed Nidoking and Nidoqueen with actual coverage. Kanto had no shortage of good Ground-types, but they needed to get in their bag to really cook on that battle.
One of the reasons Klara is my favorite rival is because her actually cheating in our third battle left a big impression on me, lol.
I like the idea in principle, but it’s the kind of thing I could see becoming old hat pretty quickly. I don’t fault GF for generally wanting all battles to play by consistent rules. I tend to consider that a strength of their game design, in fact.
Plus, I think the specifics of how a character could cheat might be tricky to nail down — personally, I like how Klara / Avery’s instance was just a pretty simple “they set up Toxic Spikes / Psychic Terrain while you weren’t looking” as opposed to something outright hacky like, I don’t know, sending out three Pokémon at once or something.
I like the idea in principle, but it’s the kind of thing I could see becoming old hat pretty quickly. I don’t fault GF for generally wanting all battles to play by consistent rules. I tend to consider that a strength of their game design, in fact.
Plus, I think the specifics of how a character could cheat might be tricky to nail down — personally, I like how Klara / Avery’s instance was just a pretty simple “they set up Toxic Spikes / Psychic Terrain while you weren’t looking” as opposed to something outright hacky like, I don’t know, sending out three Pokémon at once or something.
That would require coding a whole new battle style just for that battle, and also raise the question of why, upon seeing that, the player couldn't just also throw out 2 more Pokémon. See the massive pile of stuff online about why the player doesn't just send out a second Pokémon during SOS battles in gen 7.
Personally I think they should have took his team in the direction of being a Safari Zone theme, as in the context of the region some of the species are more rare. Rhyhorn and the Nidos are there already, maybe add a Tauros or Kangaskhan (neutral typing + strong + safari zone), for instance. I think it'd make sense for a guy who cares so much about exclusive Pokemon and having the best team around would not 100% commit to his typing, and would value things like species from the Safari Zone.
Pokemon Reborn gives every gym leader its own terrain (called field) that the team takes advantage of and honestly it can get pretty exhausting. Especially when half of them aren't intuitive at all (Chess Terrain lmao), and some are downright not fun for the Ice Gym lmao.
A lot of the time the teams basically just get free stat boosts and you kind of just have an inherent disadvantage beyond just the opposing team having better teambuilding. And some of it is just luck-based, or frustrating...
I think having the AI get field advantages can for sure be done, but if you overdo it it becomes annoying, or downright impossible to keep interesting without bloat like this. I'd like to see AI cheating but in like really story-focused contexts.
Before SWSH came out I had this idea that Hop would lose to the player in a stadium context and feel embarassed as the younger brother of the reigning champion. Because of this, he'd eventually be convinced by Team Yell (who I thought would be an actual thing lmao) to try some experimental power booster, basically allowing every one of his Pokemon to Dynamax in a single battle.
After like the 7th gym battle Hop would challenge you right after the battle, and use this.
When SWSH came out I added a bit to this idea: Regardless of if the player wins or loses, the next sequence would be about how this has injured his Pokemon, and he'd have a redemption arc with raising the Charmander that in actual SWSH the player gets from Hop's room, and while helping you beat Team Yell he'd rediscover why he actually likes Pokemon training.
This is my idea of how this type of thing can be done.
Sword and Shield have the XY effect imo, random trainers are easier than the Gym Leaders
Ex: Gentleman Glenn in Route 10 destroyed my team in a Pokemon Sword nuzlocke with that stupid Galatians Darmanitsn
Gentleman Caden on Route 7 or whatever with the Poltergeist is VERY scary if unprepared
The reporter duo at the end of Route 10 might be the hardest regular trainers in the game since they have a pretty diverse team that covers a lot of its weaknesses. Also, Leon is overrated after because I literally beat him in a Sword nuzlocke with an underleveled team of Chandelure, Pelippee, Klinklang, Through, Hatterene, and Wobbufett
Leon might be the most overrated champion fight in the games due to how strong his team looks on paper but how weak it is in practice.. maybe I'm just lucky, but we all know that isn't true.
Ex: Gentleman Glenn in Route 10 destroyed my team in a Pokemon Sword nuzlocke with that stupid Galatians Darmanitsn
Gentleman Caden on Route 7 or whatever with the Poltergeist is VERY scary if unprepared
The reporter duo at the end of Route 10 might be the hardest regular trainers in the game since they have a pretty diverse team that covers a lot of its weaknesses. Also, Leon is overrated after because I literally beat him in a Sword nuzlocke with an underleveled team of Chandelure, Pelippee, Klinklang, Through, Hatterene, and Wobbufett
Leon might be the most overrated champion fight in the games due to how strong his team looks on paper but how weak it is in practice.. maybe I'm just lucky, but we all know that isn't true.
SwSh leaders are plenty hard if the player bans Dynamax. Otherwise, yeah, paper-thin.
My thing with leaders is that...hard isn't what I'd want from them. I want leaders that force the player to learn something about the game. Type matchups are something, but not just that. Give one leader a Baton Pass team so that players learn to phaze. Put a bug leader with U-Turn spam into resists so that "Spam Fire" is no longer an auto-win. It's not that monotype leaders have to be bad, it's that there's no theme or goal for their teams. Yes, we're all experts here and will pull out a TM for Stealth Rock, so it's not going to be hard. But for new players, that sort of thing will make them feel very clever if they figure out any strategy other than "Grind More". As-is, what does the player get out of facing the avg leader? How does fighting any of them really make you better at the game?
My thing with leaders is that...hard isn't what I'd want from them. I want leaders that force the player to learn something about the game. Type matchups are something, but not just that. Give one leader a Baton Pass team so that players learn to phaze. Put a bug leader with U-Turn spam into resists so that "Spam Fire" is no longer an auto-win. It's not that monotype leaders have to be bad, it's that there's no theme or goal for their teams. Yes, we're all experts here and will pull out a TM for Stealth Rock, so it's not going to be hard. But for new players, that sort of thing will make them feel very clever if they figure out any strategy other than "Grind More". As-is, what does the player get out of facing the avg leader? How does fighting any of them really make you better at the game?
QuentinQuonce
formerly green_typhlosion
Most underwhelming final leader? In RB, yes, because nearly all bosses' Pokemon in that game have their dreadful level-up movesets so he's incredibly underpowered. In Yellow slightly less, because his Pokemon have somewhat optimised movesets and one or two coverage options thrown in. (Strangely in Yellow none of his team know Fissure - his Rhydon even has Horn Drill instead).
Then in FRLG it's a weird midpoint between the two because his Pokemon have designed movesets again, but for some reason they're not quite as good as the ones from Yellow.
But most underwhelming gym leader full stop? Eh. No, I think there are a lot of others who're worse.
Why would they have Fissure? His TM is Earthquake.
QuentinQuonce
formerly green_typhlosion
Not in Yellow, it isn't.
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