burninmylight said:
Funny that you mention Black/White, the generation that technically had the most "new" mon, but the majority of them were blatant ripoffs of Gen 1 mon. Timburr line = discount Machop line, Trubbish = discount Grimer, Sawk & Throh = uglier Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee, and so on. To each their own, but to me and many others, Gen 5 felt very uninspired. Like I said, nothing wrong with limiting the Regional Dex. I feel like Gen 7 handled this better than any other game. The majority of new mon (regional forms count as new mon in this case) really felt like they belonged in Alola and helped tell the story of that land, like the Alolan Raticate/Gumshoos rivalry, and the fairy mon that looks like a lei but I can't remember the name. But at the same time, those games didn't limit your access to any other Pokemon. If you really wanted to collect them all, either as a completionist or for battling purposes, you could collect them all. That is more content that is completely optional. Why wouldn't you want more optional content available to the people who want it? More Pokemon doesn't mean more bloat and less polish. Pokemon isn't Smash Bros., where Sakurai meticulously fine tunes each fighter for balancing purposes. I guarantee you that GameFreak don't give a shit about that kind of balance. If you want a polished, fresh experience (lol, why are you playing Pokemon then?), then you look for that in the story mode. Then after the story mode, why can't the rest of us have more? The latter doesn't hurt your experience in ANY way. Again, we have proof of that already in previous games. |
My argument has never been that a limited 'mon game couldn't be done better. I admitted in my last post that the designs in B/W weren't always the best, even. My argument is just that a full Dex isn't inherently better and there is a trade-off at hand. There are plenty of reasons to think that the game could be better if it was more limited, some of which I detailed previously.
The core of it is that every Pokemon in the game takes some amount of dev time. Having more Pokemon does hurt my experience by sacrificing dev time that I feel could be better used elsewhere (and with this effort I am asking for, the amount of effort balloons as more Pokemon are added). I would personally rather a game that focused on other means of providing a fuller, more polished experience than a game which spent that time making sure that 1k Pokemon are all jammed in.
Sure, it isn't as detailed as Smash Bros, but it isn't hard to imagine a Pokemon game which put more effort into polishing the Pokemon's battle animations, because that game already exists in Pokemon Stadium (which has much more limited movesets and a smaller roster and was heavily limited in scope). Compare the animations in that game to the animations and S/S and they have way more personality and individuality. When a Pokemon does a kick, it looks like they are doing a kick. Again, they aren't perfect, but I don't think the level of animations you are getting from Pokemon Stadium is something you can really expect when there are 1000 Pokemon each with a total movepool around 50 moves.
In my opinion, the "right direction" for Pokemon is the one which focuses on polish and details, not the one that focuses on numbers.
EDIT: I also just want to note real quick, S/S had little excuse to not include more Pokemon. While it likely did save them some time and allowed them to use resources elsewhere, it really didn't show as that game did not look or play very well. So just to clarify, there are three options imo:
1) Less pokemon with a lot of polish
2) More pokemon with little polish
3) Less pokemon with little polish
Obviously 2 is going to be preferable to three. I wouldn't argue that. However, if we are talking about the direction we want Pokemon to go, I'd take 1 over 2 personally.