Pokemon fans are also gooners! And they have bad taste too! They are either furry-bluds, diddybluds, or longhoused liking these fat bitches like the one in Galar, or that black librarian... Lenovo or sum shit... Ion even kno what to say no mo mane. This young generation is lost.
Pokemon is a franchise you naturally grow out of around 10-12. The kids who didn’t find something more interesting and stuck to Pokemon were the special ed fatties with autism and development issues.
There’s still value in Pokémon that would hold adult gamers’ interest, it’s just not found in playing the mainline games as intended by gamefreak/the pokemon company.
Competitive battling against other humans is extremely deep, and there’s a healthy scene around modding and playing some of the older games in ways they were not intended to be played (Nuzlockes, speedrunning)
Gen IV is one of the best from a conceptual standpoint because, like you said, it leans heavily into the religious side of the world. I think this is because the games came out around the same time that a lot of pop culture eschewed kiddie aesthetics in favor of darker, moodier settings (twilight princess, batman begins, MCR and similar bands). While I don’t think pokemon took it nearly as far as others, there is something to be said about the gravity of gen iv’s story (giratina, darkrai as well). I remember watching the arceus movie when it came out thinking “there’s no way this nigga Ash makes it out alive!!!” The concept of taming such primordial elements of the universe like space and time stirs something in the soul, even in kids.
Because of this, I think galar had potential to be a really great region. I remember the games hinted at some sort of pre-anglo brittonic culture that controlled the region in the past, and they could have ran with that idea but gf completely dropped the ball in that regard.
We don't realize how deep the emotions run in kids and how we intuitively understand a lot of things about the world and just lack the knowledge to understand it. Pokemon hits those notes completely, which is why I think so many of us remember it fondly beyond just nostalgia.
Back then though, the world was just different and you can feel it in comparison to today. The soul that went into things was completely different.
I have fond memories of heart gold and soul silver as young lad. Even the stupid little Pokéwalkers were a fun way to interact with my friends while at school. How the mighty have fallen smh
My friends and I all grew up with Pokemon. I still vividly remember the Christmas when I was 8 getting leaf green years after its release (I'd only had the hand-me-down gbc games before this). It sparked my imagination in a way that would be replicated by Oblivion, Morrowind, and Daggerfall 4 years later. HeartGold was my favourite growing up because of how much I liked silver beforehand. I'd say gen 5 is my favourite now despite my dislike of the NYC setting. If we include fan games, Clover takes the cake, however.
It's strange to me how much worthless dialogue they add + the long tutorials after gen 6. I tried to play Scarlet recently, but I got so bored. It's confounding how they handhold you comapred to the earliest gens. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you, except I kept up thoroughly into gen 7 because of a blerd friend and one youtuber he and I watched. This youtuber was our last link to the series in a way. He had a roulette free-for-all system that made him fun to watch, but he eventually tried (and failed) to become a breadtuber.
I think it's ironic that despite the games being infantilized to the point of borderline retardation and the gradual sanding away of all the franchise's once sharper corners, the franchise is increasingly marketed towards adult fans as a sort of "lifestyle" franchise (as seen in, as you so eloquently put it, normgroid stacy foids stocking their room with plushes, getting Pikachu-themed kitchen appliances, etc.) that can be shoved into every facet of one's life. I wasn't kidding about the Pikachu kitchen appliances - they recently revealed a Pikachu-themed line of cookware by Le Crueset where the dutch oven alone costs $450. You saw it in the recent Pokemon-branded Lego sets, as well, which I believe the largest also had a price tag of $650. No kid's got the pocket change for that, and ultimately, that'll be what sinks the Pokemon ship; just like kids can't afford Lego sets anymore, they're getting priced out of the merchandise and things like the card game (Logan Paul just sold a Pikachu trading card for like 16 million dollars, I heard), and without new kids coming in, the franchise will gradually attrite fans until it's irrelevant. At least in the West. Compare and contrast with Japan, where I saw multiple Pokemon Center stores in every city with a population above 150,000, filled with kids.
I'd like to lay the blame on GameFreak increasingly bringing in Western personnel to work on the games, especially in the design and art department, but I know that the C-Suite is pretty much content to coast on their laurels since they know they can put Pikachu on a bag of dog shit and collectors will be buying it from scalpers off eBay for triple the original asking price. Suffering from success, I suppose, but I still hate to see it because the series meant a lot to me for a long time. It seems that the new sequel to Legends: Arceus (which was the last great game in the series, I agree) was so half-assed and poorly made that even the legendarily sycophantic fanbase was ripping it to shreds in reviews, so, who knows - maybe they hit peak saturation and it will be diminishing returns from here on out.
All this is to say, Gen III was the best and it never got better than that.
Pokemon the game system is still fun. I thoroughly enjoyed emulating Scarlet two weeks before it released and working together with other retard fanboys to try to figure out some of the more obscure evolutions (Palafin took a week or so, IIRC: you could do it solo by opening up two iterations of the emulator, loading up the same save and linking your two iterations of the same file to meet the "have another player online watch" criteria): that had the magic of the old games because of the collaborative nature of it. S/V, however, look worse than fucking Falcom games and play like shit. I watched my wife emulate some of the new legends game and it looks pretty fun mechanically, but performance wise is at least two console gens behind.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue: GameFreak are not good at making video games. However, the Pokemon fandom is extremely good at making games. Shit like Infinite Fusion or the Dray hacks or Radical Red are 100% good games, not just good rom hacks/RPGmaker clones.
For newer games, Yakuza Infinite Wealth is a great Pokemon Coliseum clone once you unlock the mons side activity. Default combat system is fun but too easy: there is a lot of skill interaction with knockback and in-battle objects/surfaces you don't generally see in turn based jRPGs.
I still listen to Pokemon music in Nintendo compilations all the time. There's something truly melancholic about the music and environments of those early games. My first one was FireRed.
It's a fucking shame that The Pokemon Company are lazy bastards. So much good stuff coming out of Japan and these fucks can't use the technology at hand to make something truly amazing. People have been dying for that true open-world Pokemon since even before Breath of the Wild, and that game pretty well solidified that they could do it.
Now your best bet is to check out what modders are do, which is frankly impressive as hell. Most of them are situated in the GOATED Gen 3 era, as they should.
"A human being dies because they slowly decay until they break down. A lobster dies because it gets more and more magnificent until its greatness is simply too much to bear, and the shell it has created is so powerful that it cannot be shed. Lobsters die at their greatest state, human beings die at their worst state."
Can I borrow this for a sci-fi/fantasy series where some of the antagonists genetically modify themselves with lobster (or similar alien creature) genes to achieve biological immortality?
I was an OG poke-trainer, I bought the original gameboy that took 4 AA batteries to buy red and yellow.
One of the things that bothered me with newer generations was the lack of scalability. As you mentioned many of the fans aged and still liked playing but the games became ridiculously easy. They could have easily made a "hard" (adult) setting.
I briefly peeked back in on some of the newer gens and was hugely turned off by how much mandatory dialogue, exposition and instruction there was. Somehow the earlier, better games never needed dozens of instructional unskippable interactions. Why do you think they added in so many tutorials?
I got big into Pokemon when I was in grade school around the late 2000s and early 2010s, particularly the Mystery Dungeon spinoffs, but also Gens 3-4. In the late 2010s I've wanted to replay the series but lacked the hardware nor time (the Nintendo 3DS emulator developed quite late in its dev cycle), so I had to settle for Let's Plays on YouTube.
Around 4 years ago I rediscovered the series through its amazing fangame community, and while the main games have somewhat enshittified and strayed from their roots, the fangames (And ROMhacks/mods) are absolute gold! They are often designed with the style of Gen 3-5 to mind, what many consider the golden age of Pokemon graphics.
I started with the ROMhack Pokemon Unbound (which went up to Gen 7), before jumping to Pokemon Reborn (my first "Epic" hack going to Gen 7 with a Gen 8 mod), Pokemon Fantasy (basically Pokemon reimagined in a fantasy world with mons going up to Gen 8), Pokemon Tectonic (one of the best fangames that completely redesign the gameplay to be something much more fun, going up to Gen 8), Pokemon Floral Tempus EX, Pokemon Realidea System (a Spanish Pokemon fangame that goes up to Gen 7 I believe, but has portraits and even CGs), Pokemon Reminiscencia (a roguelike that goes up to Gen 9 made by the same dev as Realidea System, also with portraits and CGs), among others.
At this point, the average Pokemon fangame, thanks to a fanmade RPG Maker XP project called Pokemon Essentials, has all 1025+ Pokemon from Gen 1-9 catchable, usually with all regionals and even fakemon/custom regionals. They are often made for older fans in mind, with more mature stories and much more difficult gameplay. However, they also contain many modern and quality of life features from easy grinding with EXP candies (restricted to level caps), to animated Pokemon Gen 5 style sprites for all 1025+ Pokemon, to DevNavs that allow you to see what new Pokemon you can catch in a region, HMs replaced, faster movement and text speed than the vanilla games, "symbol" encounters with Pokemon on the overworld, and even sidequests with a quest tracker like many traditional RPGs.
Some of these games like Pokemon Reborn or Rejuvenation are epics that took years to complete development, come with 18 gyms (one for each type), tons of side content, unique and memorable encounters for rare Pokemon, and can comprise over 100 hours of quality content all 100% for free!
This was what I and basically all millennials were saying like 10 years ago. Now I love Pokemon again after seeing the sheer joy of my child watching me play Pokemon. It is hard to describe the hype of our family when we watched Ash become the world champion. Pokemon isn’t a series that grows with you, but it’s a series that is waiting for you to enjoy with the next generation.
Pokemon fans are also gooners! And they have bad taste too! They are either furry-bluds, diddybluds, or longhoused liking these fat bitches like the one in Galar, or that black librarian... Lenovo or sum shit... Ion even kno what to say no mo mane. This young generation is lost.
Thanks a lot man you just made me remember the pokenut year guy
Oh my gooood. I remember that guy.
is this an ifunny thing
No I think he’s a meme elsewhere too
i see
Pokemon is a franchise you naturally grow out of around 10-12. The kids who didn’t find something more interesting and stuck to Pokemon were the special ed fatties with autism and development issues.
There’s still value in Pokémon that would hold adult gamers’ interest, it’s just not found in playing the mainline games as intended by gamefreak/the pokemon company.
Competitive battling against other humans is extremely deep, and there’s a healthy scene around modding and playing some of the older games in ways they were not intended to be played (Nuzlockes, speedrunning)
Gen IV is one of the best from a conceptual standpoint because, like you said, it leans heavily into the religious side of the world. I think this is because the games came out around the same time that a lot of pop culture eschewed kiddie aesthetics in favor of darker, moodier settings (twilight princess, batman begins, MCR and similar bands). While I don’t think pokemon took it nearly as far as others, there is something to be said about the gravity of gen iv’s story (giratina, darkrai as well). I remember watching the arceus movie when it came out thinking “there’s no way this nigga Ash makes it out alive!!!” The concept of taming such primordial elements of the universe like space and time stirs something in the soul, even in kids.
Because of this, I think galar had potential to be a really great region. I remember the games hinted at some sort of pre-anglo brittonic culture that controlled the region in the past, and they could have ran with that idea but gf completely dropped the ball in that regard.
Twilight Princess, Mario strikers, SSBB, Sonic 06… The post-9/11 era was very edgy and serious. But it was cool.
We don't realize how deep the emotions run in kids and how we intuitively understand a lot of things about the world and just lack the knowledge to understand it. Pokemon hits those notes completely, which is why I think so many of us remember it fondly beyond just nostalgia.
Back then though, the world was just different and you can feel it in comparison to today. The soul that went into things was completely different.
I have fond memories of heart gold and soul silver as young lad. Even the stupid little Pokéwalkers were a fun way to interact with my friends while at school. How the mighty have fallen smh
My friends and I all grew up with Pokemon. I still vividly remember the Christmas when I was 8 getting leaf green years after its release (I'd only had the hand-me-down gbc games before this). It sparked my imagination in a way that would be replicated by Oblivion, Morrowind, and Daggerfall 4 years later. HeartGold was my favourite growing up because of how much I liked silver beforehand. I'd say gen 5 is my favourite now despite my dislike of the NYC setting. If we include fan games, Clover takes the cake, however.
It's strange to me how much worthless dialogue they add + the long tutorials after gen 6. I tried to play Scarlet recently, but I got so bored. It's confounding how they handhold you comapred to the earliest gens. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you, except I kept up thoroughly into gen 7 because of a blerd friend and one youtuber he and I watched. This youtuber was our last link to the series in a way. He had a roulette free-for-all system that made him fun to watch, but he eventually tried (and failed) to become a breadtuber.
I think it's ironic that despite the games being infantilized to the point of borderline retardation and the gradual sanding away of all the franchise's once sharper corners, the franchise is increasingly marketed towards adult fans as a sort of "lifestyle" franchise (as seen in, as you so eloquently put it, normgroid stacy foids stocking their room with plushes, getting Pikachu-themed kitchen appliances, etc.) that can be shoved into every facet of one's life. I wasn't kidding about the Pikachu kitchen appliances - they recently revealed a Pikachu-themed line of cookware by Le Crueset where the dutch oven alone costs $450. You saw it in the recent Pokemon-branded Lego sets, as well, which I believe the largest also had a price tag of $650. No kid's got the pocket change for that, and ultimately, that'll be what sinks the Pokemon ship; just like kids can't afford Lego sets anymore, they're getting priced out of the merchandise and things like the card game (Logan Paul just sold a Pikachu trading card for like 16 million dollars, I heard), and without new kids coming in, the franchise will gradually attrite fans until it's irrelevant. At least in the West. Compare and contrast with Japan, where I saw multiple Pokemon Center stores in every city with a population above 150,000, filled with kids.
I'd like to lay the blame on GameFreak increasingly bringing in Western personnel to work on the games, especially in the design and art department, but I know that the C-Suite is pretty much content to coast on their laurels since they know they can put Pikachu on a bag of dog shit and collectors will be buying it from scalpers off eBay for triple the original asking price. Suffering from success, I suppose, but I still hate to see it because the series meant a lot to me for a long time. It seems that the new sequel to Legends: Arceus (which was the last great game in the series, I agree) was so half-assed and poorly made that even the legendarily sycophantic fanbase was ripping it to shreds in reviews, so, who knows - maybe they hit peak saturation and it will be diminishing returns from here on out.
All this is to say, Gen III was the best and it never got better than that.
Back in my day, all Pokemons we're on handhelds! Not on these fancy consoles!!
Pokemon the game system is still fun. I thoroughly enjoyed emulating Scarlet two weeks before it released and working together with other retard fanboys to try to figure out some of the more obscure evolutions (Palafin took a week or so, IIRC: you could do it solo by opening up two iterations of the emulator, loading up the same save and linking your two iterations of the same file to meet the "have another player online watch" criteria): that had the magic of the old games because of the collaborative nature of it. S/V, however, look worse than fucking Falcom games and play like shit. I watched my wife emulate some of the new legends game and it looks pretty fun mechanically, but performance wise is at least two console gens behind.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue: GameFreak are not good at making video games. However, the Pokemon fandom is extremely good at making games. Shit like Infinite Fusion or the Dray hacks or Radical Red are 100% good games, not just good rom hacks/RPGmaker clones.
For newer games, Yakuza Infinite Wealth is a great Pokemon Coliseum clone once you unlock the mons side activity. Default combat system is fun but too easy: there is a lot of skill interaction with knockback and in-battle objects/surfaces you don't generally see in turn based jRPGs.
TLDR: play Enchant Farm you fucking faggot
wtf is enchant farm... Is this with that diddy shit?
Windi shit
Squidwarrd! The sky had a Pokemon! Squiiidwaaard!
the most i got into pokemon was project pokemon on roblox which inspired me to play fire red up to the first gym before getting bored.
E.B.K! Elite Ball Knowledge!
I still listen to Pokemon music in Nintendo compilations all the time. There's something truly melancholic about the music and environments of those early games. My first one was FireRed.
It's a fucking shame that The Pokemon Company are lazy bastards. So much good stuff coming out of Japan and these fucks can't use the technology at hand to make something truly amazing. People have been dying for that true open-world Pokemon since even before Breath of the Wild, and that game pretty well solidified that they could do it.
Now your best bet is to check out what modders are do, which is frankly impressive as hell. Most of them are situated in the GOATED Gen 3 era, as they should.
"A human being dies because they slowly decay until they break down. A lobster dies because it gets more and more magnificent until its greatness is simply too much to bear, and the shell it has created is so powerful that it cannot be shed. Lobsters die at their greatest state, human beings die at their worst state."
Can I borrow this for a sci-fi/fantasy series where some of the antagonists genetically modify themselves with lobster (or similar alien creature) genes to achieve biological immortality?
Of course, in fact I encourage it
Much appreciated
erm why are they sending kids to catch pokemon unsupervised? ash mom fucks brock much?? 😂😂😂
KEEEEEEK…
I was an OG poke-trainer, I bought the original gameboy that took 4 AA batteries to buy red and yellow.
One of the things that bothered me with newer generations was the lack of scalability. As you mentioned many of the fans aged and still liked playing but the games became ridiculously easy. They could have easily made a "hard" (adult) setting.
I briefly peeked back in on some of the newer gens and was hugely turned off by how much mandatory dialogue, exposition and instruction there was. Somehow the earlier, better games never needed dozens of instructional unskippable interactions. Why do you think they added in so many tutorials?
I got big into Pokemon when I was in grade school around the late 2000s and early 2010s, particularly the Mystery Dungeon spinoffs, but also Gens 3-4. In the late 2010s I've wanted to replay the series but lacked the hardware nor time (the Nintendo 3DS emulator developed quite late in its dev cycle), so I had to settle for Let's Plays on YouTube.
Around 4 years ago I rediscovered the series through its amazing fangame community, and while the main games have somewhat enshittified and strayed from their roots, the fangames (And ROMhacks/mods) are absolute gold! They are often designed with the style of Gen 3-5 to mind, what many consider the golden age of Pokemon graphics.
I started with the ROMhack Pokemon Unbound (which went up to Gen 7), before jumping to Pokemon Reborn (my first "Epic" hack going to Gen 7 with a Gen 8 mod), Pokemon Fantasy (basically Pokemon reimagined in a fantasy world with mons going up to Gen 8), Pokemon Tectonic (one of the best fangames that completely redesign the gameplay to be something much more fun, going up to Gen 8), Pokemon Floral Tempus EX, Pokemon Realidea System (a Spanish Pokemon fangame that goes up to Gen 7 I believe, but has portraits and even CGs), Pokemon Reminiscencia (a roguelike that goes up to Gen 9 made by the same dev as Realidea System, also with portraits and CGs), among others.
At this point, the average Pokemon fangame, thanks to a fanmade RPG Maker XP project called Pokemon Essentials, has all 1025+ Pokemon from Gen 1-9 catchable, usually with all regionals and even fakemon/custom regionals. They are often made for older fans in mind, with more mature stories and much more difficult gameplay. However, they also contain many modern and quality of life features from easy grinding with EXP candies (restricted to level caps), to animated Pokemon Gen 5 style sprites for all 1025+ Pokemon, to DevNavs that allow you to see what new Pokemon you can catch in a region, HMs replaced, faster movement and text speed than the vanilla games, "symbol" encounters with Pokemon on the overworld, and even sidequests with a quest tracker like many traditional RPGs.
Some of these games like Pokemon Reborn or Rejuvenation are epics that took years to complete development, come with 18 gyms (one for each type), tons of side content, unique and memorable encounters for rare Pokemon, and can comprise over 100 hours of quality content all 100% for free!
I strongly recommend these two communities for fangames: PokeCommunity https://www.pokecommunity.com/ and EeveeExpo https://eeveeexpo.com/, the latter running an "underground" Pokemon Direct for fangames.
There are mods that even make the Nintendo Switch Pokemon games quite challenging- I highly recommend Pokemon Compass for Scarlet and Violet https://www.nexusmods.com/pokemonscarletandviolet/mods/21.
Discovering this scene is actually what made me stay in Pokemon for so long, long after the main games have declined in quality.
This was what I and basically all millennials were saying like 10 years ago. Now I love Pokemon again after seeing the sheer joy of my child watching me play Pokemon. It is hard to describe the hype of our family when we watched Ash become the world champion. Pokemon isn’t a series that grows with you, but it’s a series that is waiting for you to enjoy with the next generation.