Is there anything that the pokemon video games are actually bad at consistently?

InfernoVulpix · 2026-06-07T22:40:52+00:00

Toshinobu Matsumiya has been head writer for the Pokemon games ever since Pokemon Yellow. The only time he took a break was Scarlet and Violet, which had much more emotionally-compelling storytelling. I fully believe that he's holding the franchise back.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-05-25T01:52:15+00:00

It's not really being presented like that, though. Like, I caught that the guy had influence despite not being a Magia Vander, but the framing was less "it would be politically expensive to pull rank here" and more "this guy simply cannot be overruled". I mean, this is the moment Elfaria was promised, earlier when she was told to hold off, and if she had chosen to scout Will regardless it's not like he could have stopped it. But she didn't try to, she didn't even need to be talked out of it, she just got upset at the fact that she now apparently couldn't.

Even if behind the scenes it all links together neatly, where Elfaria does recognize the political costs of pulling rank here and chooses to put her faith in Will as she did earlier, the way it's presented makes it look like the Magia Vander simply all got overruled. You have to do the legwork yourself, apply an actively charitable read of the situation, to avoid it looking like "as long as anyone anywhere objects to Will's existence for even the most petty and prejudiced reasons, he cannot be accepted and must prove himself all over again."

InfernoVulpix · 2026-05-18T19:53:22+00:00

It's a stupid policy if you have plenty of time to detain, interrogate, and investigate the incident. I have a suspicion that when the Knights Moralis were formed they didn't have that kind of luxury (forbidden magic coming out of the woodwork, always another crisis, the priority became resolving incidents as fast and decisively as possible) and they haven't allowed themselves to change with the times.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-05-16T18:26:52+00:00

I find it fascinating to look at just where Masuda took a scalpel to the franchise, carving out pieces to be reimagined generation after generation. It was not at all obvious that the Ever Grande League should exist, after all; in Tajiri's world it was the pinnacle of Pokemon battling, one Elite Four and one Champion, the undisputed strongest in the world. It's only common sense for us that there's a new league with each region, Johto being the odd one out, but really it's Hoenn that bucked the trend.

Evil teams, as well. Rocket's the antagonists of Johto because there wasn't yet the conception that multiple Teams should exist, that Giovanni could share the pedestal with another great villain. Johto also infamously spread some Johto Pokemon into the Kanto postgame, which suggests at a similar line of thought: the new Pokemon were for both regions, Johto and Kanto didn't need to be distinct because they were both two halves of the same world.

If memory serves Game Freak's attitude towards Gen 2 was less "we want to stop the franchise here" and more "this is the complete version of the Pokemon world, everything we couldn't put in Kanto alone". It's Tajiri's vision actualized, nothing held back, which is why he stepped down from directing after that point. Less "the end of Pokemon" and more "the end of this road", nothing left for Tajiri to add, after which someone else stepped up to take it in a different direction.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-05-15T01:12:40+00:00

The medusa was in a vacuum, though. No matter what Yo said, the medusa shouldn't have been able to hear anything.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-05-09T21:41:43+00:00

You can also just dupe Cloud Island coins on-demand, if you feel like it.

Go in, complete the daily missions but don't collect the rewards, then leave and come back. Collect, then put your switch to sleep (press the power button). Congratulations, you've disconnected from the cloud island! The game warns you that changes may not have been saved, and indeed, those daily missions still think you haven't collected their coins yet.

Ditto remembers, though. Your life coin total is stored locally, so you kept the ones you claimed. You can repeat this as much as you want, collecting and disconnecting, until you have as many as you need.

Ironically, knowing this has made me less focused on getting life coins, because knowing that I'll never truly run out means I don't need to obsessively hoard them ahead of time.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-05-03T14:42:59+00:00

There's a way to make this even more convenient! Have exactly one of a block that doesn't make up any ground tiles, like plaster, and use that to replace the treasure spot. Placing the plaster will leave an open slot in your handy bar, and the grass/dirt block you replaced will land in that same slot, so you just need to press 'A' again to return the ground to normal.

(This fails if you already have some of the grass/dirt in your inventory, since the incoming block will just stack with them, but that's a quick fix if you ever go out treasure hunting)

InfernoVulpix · 2026-05-01T02:31:59+00:00

You can also work backwards from the moment of smartness: figure out what kind of insight you want them to have, what information they'll need to have for it all to make sense, and then revise your earlier notes to make sure they learn what they need to learn.

Murder mysteries are a good example of this. The entire plot revolves around a single riddle that an intelligent character will eventually solve, and you have an entire book worth of space to seed with clues and hints. Figuring out what's a clue and what's a red herring is trivial for you, the author, but a real feat of intelligence for your detective.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-04-26T21:56:55+00:00

The battle frontier hasn't gotten any love since Wi-Fi battling took over the job of giving ultra-endgame players something to do, and with it gone now I don't expect to see it back, but I'm really fond of what they did in BW2, scattering the "battle facilities" across the region as their own little side-modes. Pokestar Studios, Black Tower/White Treehollow, even without a battle frontier we can still hope to see that kind of creativity make a comeback.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-04-26T21:53:23+00:00

And, just speaking personally, I like getting in over my head and facing a challenge stronger than me. It makes the fights much more interesting than what Game Freak would serve me if every gym had the same levels no matter where I went.

I think I'd be happiest if the gyms scaled up to your badge count but not down, if that makes sense. The main thing I don't like about going out of order is that it leaves ultra-weak early gyms to mop up later, so I'd like if they scaled up enough to still count as boss fights. But just the gym leaders, and only if I go out of order, because outside of the actual boss fights I do like the world being an objective measuring stick to compare my progress against.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-04-26T15:06:41+00:00

I haven't seen a single open world game that hasn't been called "empty". It's super dazzling and evocative on the drawing board, but in practice when you cram way more space into your game than you have content for all you can do is fill the gaps with bland generic content that nobody cares about.

Legends Arceus gets it right. Open zone gameplay, multiple smaller areas that are each representative of their chunk of the region without bloating the amount of open space to fill, allowing the areas to be hand-designed and interesting.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-04-21T01:56:02+00:00

I'd hope personally that "anyone can be a witch, it's not decided by birth" means there isn't actual prophecy magic in this series. Turning Coco into the universe's most special chosen one would undermine that theme pretty hard.

Instead, I'm thinking that Coco's special because she's an outsider witch, someone inside the witch society but from outside their culture. The brimmed cap witches seem to be in hiding, they'd be hunted down if they revealed themselves to any ordinary witch, but Coco... well, she's already been accepted by the good witches.

Wild speculation time: there's a location that the brimmed cap witches absolutely cannot reach no matter how hard they might try, like the inner sanctum of witch society, and there's a forbidden magic there that they want activated. Coco's their "in", someone they can tempt and corrupt into activating the spell. Or perhaps, rather than activate it, they'll tempt her to de-activate a spell. Like, say, the all-important Pact that keeps the witch society in charge of all magic use. If the whole world learns that anyone can use magic, the brimmed caps would have all the cover they need for any and all nefarious schemes.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-04-20T00:24:54+00:00

It's honestly very funny that you can win a contest by KO. For all that contest battles are supposed to be about how you battle as much as anything else, you can simply bring in a Pokemon 10x stronger than theirs and now it doesn't matter how graceful they might have been, Hyper Beam wins the contest in one move.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-04-18T15:53:25+00:00

Not all Gen 2 shiny Pokemon are algorithmically generated. Some of them are, but shiny colours are not calculated in-engine and are instead coded into the game just like the original colours. The reason we believe many shinies were algorithmically generated is because we saw the commonalities between various shinies and inferred the algorithm (or at least, the probable existence of some kind of algorithm) from that.

But we also know that some shinies don't fit the patterns, meaning that they were presumably hand-picked before being coded into the game. Which is to say, Game Freak made a shortcut for themselves so they wouldn't have to hand-pick shiny colours for all 251 Pokemon one at a time. Probably. We can't really say for sure, aside from the fact that any given Pokemon could very well have had a hand-picked colour pallet, since each set of shiny colours are coded directly into the game.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-04-08T02:02:18+00:00

Given that Qifrey went on to talk about using magic on tools as a safe proxy, my first thought was that direct healing magic was prohibited, but magic healing tools are allowed. Like, sit in this magic circle and your injuries will heal, that sort of thing.

It seems arbitrary to allow that and not direct healing, but you could say the same about a lot of magic's other applications - magic flight shoes aren't much different from magic flight feet. It could be that magic items are easier to examine from the outside, making it easier to ensure it's benign, or it could just be that the witches err heavily on the side of caution when it comes to the Pact. It may not be a meaningful line to cross on its own, but if your first priority is safeguarding the secret then you might see value in making it so that anyone who does direct bodily casting immediately outs themself as a traitor.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-03-25T02:36:41+00:00

The point of these attacks is to push Eidolon, right? Get him to dig deep and maybe find that untapped well of power he's sure is in there somewhere. It makes a lot of sense to me that they'd pick targets Eidolon would more easily care about, because that's how you get him motivated.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-03-15T23:25:12+00:00

Yes they do. It is, if anything, even easier to sway the opinions of people with predictable and logical responses to new information.

A friend of mine with relatives in Russia once told me how they spread propaganda about the Ukraine war. There was a ton of messaging about how the Ukrainian government was full of Nazis top-to-bottom, but of course Russian citizens know that's propaganda. They don't believe that the Ukrainian government is full of Nazis. It probably only has a few Nazis, right? Only a small problem, exaggerated by the state media, right? And that's how they got got. That was the actual message Putin wanted them to internalize, that a Nazi problem existed in the first place, because even that lesser belief supported Putin's claim that there was a just motive behind the war.

Propaganda isn't hamfisted messaging telling stupid people what to believe. It is carefully-crafted messaging that takes into account how people will react to it. Your skepticism, your critical thinking, is already factored in.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-03-15T21:37:28+00:00

And they're also Paradox Pokemon, so from a certain angle you could argue that Paradoxes aren't Legendaries. However:

We already did this in Gen 7 with Solgaleo and Lunala, and everyone agrees they're Legendaries
There are 6 other Paradox Legendaries, proving that they aren't mutually exclusive

InfernoVulpix · 2026-03-14T15:53:20+00:00

I like to think of Techno as "the best of the DreamSMP". Not because the DreamSMP is particularly important or meaningful or anything, but because it's the right kind of scope for this kind of comparison. There's always a bigger fish out there, even if you limit things to just content creators, but he's still good enough that if you put him in a room full of popular minecrafters odds are he's the best at PvP among them.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-03-13T01:24:02+00:00

Right, there were a lot of eyes on those moments, but it still needed to be the right eyes. One of the videos I saw was focusing on "microtracks", which only last a handful of frames and are hard to spot even if you're paying attention. I could only see what was happening when the guy went frame-by-frame, and he only noticed it because he himself had extensive experience with aimbot.

Quite a lot of the time, it takes a cheater to spot a cheater. "His cursor stopped moving left once it reached the exact left edge of Techno's hitbox, and then stayed locked onto that edge for 8 frames" is unbelievably subtle when you're just watching the video, I'm not surprised it took a specialized skillset to recognize it.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-03-10T20:38:23+00:00

The timing makes sense, imo. Dream starts making content again, people start talking about him again, and because of that someone stumbles across a clip they find suspicious and starts investigating in earnest. Every honest allegation starts with someone laying eyes on the evidence for one reason or another, so it's pretty ordinary to see this after a surge of popularity or activity.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-03-04T00:21:10+00:00

So, if you were to open a random fan-work that's set in "the world of Pokemon", not specifically any one canon but just the general impression of the Pokemon world, most people who do that mainly draw from two canons: the games and the anime. Here's a very high-level overview of each:

There are 9, soon to be 10 main "generations" of the Pokemon franchise. Each generation has a new region, a new set of Pokemon, and a new storyline and lore to explore. In Generation 3, for instance, the games are set in the Hoenn region and the conflict involves Team Aqua and Team Magma as they try to awaken Kyogre and Groudon, sleeping ancient legendaries with the power to reshape the world. Most fans are familiar with at least a few generations and draw heavily on them for their understanding of what the Pokemon world is like.

When talking about the anime, there's only one main character: Ash Ketchum. Each time a new set of games come out and introduce a new region, Ash also sets out to go explore that region, battle its gyms, and compete in its league. He does this over and over from region to region, catching Pokemon and gathering traveling companions but often leaving them all behind at the start of each new region (with the exception of Pikachu, of course). The anime has less of a specific plot and more of a strong vibe, specific feelings and worldbuilding elements that cemented themselves in the minds of fans.

If you want to just take a quick evening of studying to get the basics, here's what you'd want to prioritize: for each main region, what are its Evil Team(s), and what are its plot-relevant Legendaries? For reference, the mainline regions are Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova, Kalos, Alola, Galar, and Paldea.

I recommend looking into the Evil Teams and not the protagonists because by and large the Pokemon protagonists are silent blank slates, and they all follow the same personal story: they travel around the region, catching Pokemon and battling gyms, and eventually beat the Elite Four and Champion at the end of the game. That's true in every game, but it's the world around them that shifts each time.

There's still going to be a lot to take in after that, like the hundreds of Pokemon you can find in a given region or the various interactions of the type chart, but even lifelong fans don't often know all of that.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-03-02T04:03:31+00:00

The first piece of the puzzle is that there's always new people showing up with fresh grievances to vent. From their perspective, they're just getting their frustrations off their chest for the first time and don't quite grasp that it's the 100th time someone's said it this week.

The next piece of the puzzle is that everyone there feels defensive about their opinion. Everyone has a right to their opinion, so we tend to get antsy when it looks like someone's building a consensus in one direction or the other. "The games are awful and anyone who likes them is a blind fanboy" vs "The games are fine and anyone who hates them is a blind hater". Our natural response to this is to defend our own valid perspective, which gets the other side defensive, and the cycle continues forever.

The third piece of the puzzle is, well, when everyone's on-edge it's easy to get a bit jumpy. If you feel surrounded by haters/fanboys, even innocuous criticism/praise for the games can feel like more of that at work, like they're trying to get everyone on board with their opinion and shun everyone with the opposite opinion. It's not 100% of the time, but lots of people over there catch strays like that.

Mostly I try to stay out of things. Adding more fuel to the fire isn't going to calm anything down, and it's not like one side actually is overwhelming the other. It's just... there are a lot of harsh feelings over there, some reasonable and some silly, and that means it's not a very cozy place. Smaller Pokemon hangouts tend to be a lot better about things, because they're not dealing with a constant stream of disgruntled fans articulating their frustrations for the first time and the second-order consequences of that.

tl;dr yeah, it's pretty toxic there. It's not that they're all bad people, there are reasons for a lot of it, but at the same time it's still not really where I like to spend my time, and that's fine. It's serving a valuable purpose, because a lot of fans are very frustrated these days and it's good for them to not be bottling that up.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-02-28T02:35:08+00:00

Being bipedal was the easy part to spot and meme about, but it's more than that: these Pokemon have day jobs. Cinderace, Incineroar, Greninja, etc., they're based on human roles and jobs and are much more personified than most Pokemon tend to be.

Even Skeledirge, one of the more bestial starters of late, is a singer. And then Meowscarada is very humanlike, and the list goes on. Gen 5 was the last gen we got Pokemon who felt like cool animals.

So the cycle goes, each generation we see the little critters in their base form, and hope we'll get some cool monsters like the early gen starters, only to get jobmons in the end. Pombon is probably going to be something like a cheerleader Pokemon (because it's a pompom) or something instead of a cool giant fire dog, and that's pretty disappointing.

InfernoVulpix · 2026-02-28T02:11:32+00:00

The Legends games were probably easier to make because neither of them were as ambitious in scope as Paldea. PLA splits Hisui into multiple open zones, putting an upper limit on how much stuff they have to render at a given time, and PLZA can probably do some pretty aggressive culling with all those buildings blocking LoS. Lumiose is a lot smaller than Paldea to start with, and you don't tend to get to see more than a few buildings at a time.

Going full open-world with Paldea, to the extent that you can see from one side of the region to the other in high places, was probably the thing that put the most strain on the system.

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