I'm the resident Minecraft Defender, but there are definitely a couple of things I want/want changed in the game. Most of these are just little changes, but just for the sake of it I'll also include my one idea for the ever-so desired End Update at the end just cuz
Kiln
Oh my god this is easily my most wanted feature. If it isn't obvious, it's just a Blast Furnace/Smoker for ceramic stuff, like bricks, glass, and stone. It's actually such an obvious and easy addition, and I need it so badly. It's so awkward to have basic furnaces in an auto smelter to deal with all those clearly related blocks while every other thing has their special super-fast smelter. It'll also so obviously going to be called a Kiln too. I just need it so bad…
Side Slabs/Stairs
Also pretty obvious. Arches will be so much more smooth and nice if you could just put slabs on the side of a block. Really, the only complication would be how to actually implement it. Personally I'd say you could just have an assigned Rotate hotkey, which could also honestly be super useful for blocks like logs or observers and such so you don't always have to get/place in a super specific spot for them to be facing the way you want. Could also help to maybe have a toggleable ghost box to show where exactly you're going to place something.
This is also to say I want slabs, stairs, and walls/fences for more blocks, like Calclite and Amethyst specifically. I could even go for something as crazy as Dirt Slabs, so you could make really smooth landscapes. Honestly if I ever make a Minecraft mod, it'll just be called like Slab Everything, and it just makes those block types for almost every block.
Post-death XP
Honestly it's just super annoying to have a ton of levels, die, and be completely unable to recover most of them because I guess the leftover XP you get after you die caps at level 7-ish. Personally, I just want it to be a percentage, like maybe 25-30% of what you had when you died. It wouldn't give you too much more than how things are now, and since XP orbs can burn it's not a crazy boon. I just want to have a decent level after dying at like level 60-100. If you get to that big of a level, you deserve to keep more of it when you die.
Trial mobs return to their spawner eventually
An opinion fresh off of my latest Trial Chamber attempt, where a Breeze just kinda went off and did his own thing somewhere else in the chamber and I straight up never found him. I wasted so much time looking for it, which was especially annoying since my Omen effect was on a timer. All they need to do is find their way back to their spawner somehow, or maybe just teleport to it, if they don't agro on a player for a while. There's nothing fun about scouring every last inch of a chamber for one mob so you can get your reward.
Mob animation quality
It's just cosmetic, but I kinda want the overall quality of mob animations to improve. Not like they're bad per se, what I specifically mean is that I want other mobs to meet the animation quality of the certain few mobs with really good animations, like frogs, the new rabbits, Wardens, Breezes, and the Creaking. It feels weird when those mobs look so perfect, but then you get on a horse and its legs don't even remotely gallop how they should. Personally I'm super sold on those animation packs and I'd love for the default to be around like 50% as good as that (since some of the animations are a bit OTT for the default game)
Potion optimizations
I was watching About Oliver's blind playthrough of Minecraft a bit ago and while he was able to learn how to make all potions just by brute force, I realized it honestly should be way more obvious what paths you should take to get real potions.
Most importantly, I just think the base potions need different names, and the completely useless ones need to be culled. The Awkward potion sounds just as much of a failure as the Mundane and Thick potions, despite it being the you HAVE to use for 99% of the potions, so definitely change that one to just "Base Potion" or "Potion Base." If anyone stumbles upon that potion, they know they did something right, while also showing they should brew that potion with more ingredients to get what they really want. Could also be useful to make the sprite have more of a clear or red (because of the warts) liquid, just to show it's special. It wouldn't glow like realized potions, though.
For a possible Mundane potion, I actually think all the potions with negative effects (Weak, Slow, Poison, Harming, etc) should all stem from this potion, leaving all the positive potions to the Potion Base. Logically, it kind of makes sense that the potions that do damage or make you worse stem from "failed" experiments. Also, it means that you could get these potions earlier, since you could just dump any random potion ingredient to get them started. That would make it more possible for you to actually use these potions in the early game (assuming you get a brewing stand from a village), since by the time you get a good amount of warts, you might as well just keep using the basic weapons that are already pretty reliable.
Enchant optimizations
This is the big one. While I'm not the type of guy who thinks the whole enchantment system needs to be overhauled (wouldn't mind getting rid of the Too Expensive cap tho), I do honestly think there should be lots of optimizations so there's more variety with less limitations.
First off, it's just for the sake of satisfaction, but I really wish the final enchant levels were more even across the board. Mainly I just want to get Protection V. I don't even care if it's mechanically identical to Protection IV, I just think it's so dissatisfying for all the Damage and Efficiency enchants to go up to V, while the Protections are capped at IV. It could also be nice for any II enchants to have a III, like Knockback III, or just be left at level I for their whole effect. So, basically, the max enchant levels would just be I (which wouldn't have the numeral, like Mending), III, and V, depending on the enchant.. It just feels nicer.
The bigger idea though is that I REALLY want the enchants to be more universal, and by extension have more obvious names. This is mainly because of enchanted books, which just get a random enchant from the entire pool of enchants, so you'll find one that just has like Impaling IV and Breach II and you're like "ok well great this is completely useless until I have the one weapon that these enchants are for."
Here's how I'd spread them out, along with other random changes:
A blanket "Damage" enchant, which still functions how it does for each weapon individually, but can just be put on any weapon no matter what. This would combine Sharpness, Power, Impaling, and Density, and can be applied to all tools.
Not really relevant to the subject, but a Smite/Bane-alike enchant for dealing damage to Pillagers (and Villagers/maybe Golems by extension) and Piglins. Not sure what it would be called. Also one for dealing damage to animals, probably called Butchering.
Also not relevant, but there should definitely be some sort of dangerous mob that is affected by Bane of Arthropods, since it's so obviously useless compared to the other enchants. Since I know Terraria, maybe an Antlion class of enemies in a special desert biome. Also, The Bane of Arthropods name is kinda dumb. Should just be like Crushing or something.
A Magic Protection enchant for armor, which protects against Guardian, Vex, Evoker, potion, and Shulker attacks, as well as the Ender Dragon's breath.
Punch and Knockback fuse, obviously. Genuinely no idea why they're separate. Can also be applied to other weapons, and to Shovels, Axes, and Pickaxes, which will be super useful since the one time where you'd want to knock an opponent back is when you already have your pick out, so you could easily switch to your actual weapon.
Flame and Fire Aspect also fuse. Flame is a much simpler name so stick with that one.
Fortune combines with Looting and Luck of the Sea, and can be put on all tools no matter what (except like Flint and Steel, I guess). Namely shears, so you could possibly get more leaves from a tree, or more wool from a sheep. Luck of the Sea could still exist, but Fortune should be able to be put on fishing rods, letting you possibly fish up more fish/etc each cast.
Infinity can apply to Tridents, so they work like how Drowned use them, where you can just repeatedly throw tridents without having to recover them or wait for Loyalty.
Loyalty can apply to bows and crossbows, so any missed arrows will return to you.
Multishot, Piercing, and Quick Charge can apply to regular bows and Tridents. Could be mutually exclusive with Damage to balance it out.
Lunge and Riptide can apply to Tridents and Spears respectively.
Respiration could be applied to Tridents, so they increase breath capacity while you have them in hand.
Feather Falling could be applied to Maces, so they reduce fall damage while you have them in hand, just in case you miss your attack.
To give chestplates their own unique enchant, they could have Magnetism, which increases block pickup radius.
The Sweep attack only happens if you have Sweeping Edge on a sword. This is just to avoid hitting your pets or zombified Piglins if you decide to not want this on your main sword.
Unbreaking isn't the worst name considering how it works mechanically, but for simplicity's sake it should just be changed to Durability.
Efficiency should be renamed to just "Speed," or to make it not seem like a boot enchant, "Break/Mine Speed," or to make it coincide with the status, "Haste." It doesn't make tools more "efficient," it just makes them mine faster. If anything, Unbreaking should be called Efficiency, since it makes more efficient use of the tool's total durability.
Side idea, I really want a Haste potion that stacks with a Beacon's Haste. That, or make it so an Efficiency V Netherite tool can instamine more stuff with a Beacon's Haste II. I'm saying this because I'm mad that a max Axe can't instamine logs/wood, which is honestly more fair than letting a max Pickaxe instamine stone. Every other tool gets useful instamining, but the Axe gets nothing useful.
Those are all the changes I can think of. Again, this is just to make enchanting more obvious and optimized, as well as giving more tools more functionality besides the most obvious stuff. One downside that it would be harder to get the important enchants, like Fortune on a Pickaxe, since you'd have so much more stuff clogging up the selections on the Enchantment table. So, maybe for tools like that, the table only gives you the most obvious enchants for the tool, however you still can enchant books to add all the rest of the bells and whistles if you want it.
My End Update
The purpose of all this was to talk about small things they should add/change to make things feel more optimized, but since I was planning on making a post about what I'd want in an end update anyway, since that's the one update everyone wants, I might as well drop my two cents here instead.
The main idea for me is that I honestly want the End to stay a mostly barren wasteland. I see mods that turn it into this garish nightmare of a million different colors and blocks and formations and think "thank god that guy doesn't work at Mojang." While I definitely think the Nether benefits from having some lush areas and some nice variety in biomes, I think the End is fundamentally supposed to feel barren and dead. But, I could definitely imagine some smaller additions to it that don't completely change its vibe, but still give you something else to look for besides cities.
As for biomes, I could see there being different land generation types, like different shapes of islands, but not too many actual lush biomes. However, I do think adding exactly 1 lush-seeming biome type could benefit it a little bit. Thematically, it could be a small patch where Chorus trees are much thicker and more vibrant, maybe even going so far as having their own true wood type, or something similar to that, or a Chorus Fruit block that glows. I also think this would be a place for End Cities to primarily generate, since it would make sense for whoever built those cities to prioritize an area that seems more habitable than the rest of the End. Then, there could also be End Outposts similar to the cities that maybe hold a single Shulker and some indication of where the nearest city is relative to them. That's not to say they should be super common, but at least it would be something. I think the one thing that would benefit exploring the End is direction. Like, literally knowing what direction to go in.
The one thing I definitely do think they should add is a sort of ore to search for, which would be a parallel upgrade to Netherite. I think the idea of Diamond stuff being this sort of branching tree of different upgrades is a super cool idea, and could be super fun for customizing your armor and what you want it to do beyond your enchantments. As for the Void tools/armor, as I'll call them, I think you could find the Void crystals as a glowing crystal jutting out of only the sides/bottom of End islands, making them just a bit more difficult to get. To differentiate them, maybe they break similar to Glowstone, where they drop shards or dust, and to get the item you actually have to upgrade your Diamond with, you have to reform them in a similar way to ice, where you combine 9 dust into something, then you combine 9 of that something into the Void Ingot or whatever. That way you can't get a full Ingot from just one crystal, you do have to search for it. And, even though I think the Upgrade template idea is fundamentally kind of annoying, it would be super easy to put that in the End City chests. Maybe it could be exclusive to the ship chests, so you have two reasons to be excited to see them.
As for how Void stuff functions, at first since Netherite kind of suggests its more durable, maybe Void stuff could focus more on speed/damage. However, that would kind of make it the objectively right choice, since it's so easy to just put Unbreaking and Mending on stuff, giving you a flat speed/damage up over Netherite. So, maybe it has the same stats, but since Netherite reduces knockback, maybe Void could innately reduce fall damage, maybe making it so having full Void armor and Feather Falling IV would make you completely immune to fall damage. Or, maybe it gives you a slow falling-like effect that does a similar thing. Also, since Netherite is immune to fire/lava because it's from the Nether, maybe Void stuff could float, so if you fell into the void in the End, your Void items would rise back to a normal level, so you don't lose them that way. I feel like that's a fittingly parallel mechanic.
It also makes me think of a third possible upgrade type, and it obviously would have to be Skulk related. As I was writing this, I had the thought of how that could work: Maybe there's an invisible/otherwise ordinary block in Ancient Cities that you can't recognize unless a Warden is active and searching for you. Then, you have to mine said block, but it makes a massive noise when broken, so the difficulty would be having to face the Warden while collecting it. Then, as for its special function, stuff upgraded with it could be completely unable to despawn, so you never have to rush to get your stuff if you know it's nearby underground but you don't know exactly where. I think that's a pretty fittingly similar idea to the other two, while also being more underground-specific, and it kind of synergizing more with the Recovery Compass (since the compass is useless if you fall in lava or the void, and you know your stuff is gone). This is also not even considering the idea that it could have to do with a Skulk dimension itself, but even if they don't want to make that a thing, it could be the upgrade rep for the Overworld, unless you wanted to have a very natural, foresty upgrade type then.
Also I'd love if you could upgrade Shulker boxes with Netherite/the others so they'd have their benefits too. I did in fact lose my whole toolbox to lava and I want to prevent that.
Anyway that's it, Minecraft good actually but it can always be better
OC Island Day 1, honestly the Mii maker is the perfect amount of limitations & customization. Sucks that they still don't let you easily share screenshots so here's a photo of a screenshot for now lol
EDIT: omg you can download screenshots via USB we're so back
Man, Winds and Waves really proves how utterly shallow criticism of Pokemon is lol
I've already seen a considerable amount of people being like "OMFG GAMEFREAK ACTUALLY TRIED FOR ONCE???" meanwhile we literally know nothing about the game, just what it looks like. It's genuinely on the level of old Graphics-First gaming discussion, where things are judged basically exclusively on graphical fidelity instead of the whole picture. And yeah, since Scarlet and Violet were still pretty fun despite looking like shit, I'm sure it is going to be a good overall game. But, like, I almost feel like all this unfettered praise for the graphics kinda now went too far in the opposite direction (compared to all the previous criticism) and kind of misses how much of the game still looks bad visually?
I'm a long-time sayer that the main reason why Scarlet and Violet looked bad wasn't because all the environments looked worse than the Roblox terrain sculpter, they looked bad because it had terrible art direction. Like yeah, the environments looked unfinished, but all the humans DO look finished, but they also look terrible. They look terrible because they decided to try and aim for a sort of semi-realism, while still keeping a sort of anime shape to everyone. They had way too much detail on their clothes and hair, and the hair of Pokemon character designs were not made for hair with actual visible strands to each part of it. Also, the lighting of it all made everything feel so washed out. Like even though there isn't much actual bloom, it felt like every bright object had bloom.
And as for Pokemon, a lot of them ended up looking super desaturated and plain due to how airbrushy and uncolored their shadows were. And, all the textures they added to them are just completely useless. They're not such high quality textures that they make them look real, and their not designed for stylization, so they push it farther away from that side. Obviously some mons look better than others, but I feel like even the new mons don't benefit at all from this style. Pokemon are so inherently stylized that they really need to be shaded and colored to be stylized too. Also, my god do we need outlines for these guys again.
So now with Winds and Waves, yeah they basically maximized the environments budget and made that, as far as I can tell from this singular trailer, as good as you could reasonably expect it to be, I kinda feel like they hardly did anything to the trainers and Pokemon? It's like "what if Scarlet and Violet looked good" instead of "Hey let's completely rethink our artstyle for this one. Okay well, I guess I can't really say with all the Pokemon, I just think they straight up made Pikachu look a million times worse specifically.
Like, I genuinely am kind of baffled that I haven't seen anyone talk about how horrible this looks. Am I huffing something? They not only kept its shadows super grey, but they now are trying to make it have a sort of fluffy subsurface scattering, which just makes it look really weird and blended together. Again, Pokemon are super stylized. Why are we trying to make this guy even more realistic? And some Pokemon, like that Tropius specifically, do feel really good to look at by how they are actually decently saturated in color. Why did they decide to completely bunk the image of their mascot? And of course this is the part where I have to say that yes, its animations do look WAY better now. They almost look so good that they might make all the old animations for all the other mons look so much more lame by comparison. I just think this shading is kind of unthinkable. I obviously have to bring up my own Pikachu model, which definitely is a tad simple and doesn't have the overall polish real Pokemon models have, but it is pretty much what my ideal Pikachu look is, more or less.
But then on the other side, it feels like some mons are getting almost overly saturated. I didn't like Gecqua much at first because its in-game model looks so bright and garish, but then you look at its official art, and there it's colors are so much more balanced. Also, all these guys still have that kind of airbrushy shading. It really makes me wish they tried as much as possible to make in-game Pokemon look like the official art as much as possible. Even if the other starters work okay in-game, when you look at their official art, they just look so insanely better. It feels so obvious that Pokemon are designed for that style, but after Sword and Shield they just decided to not even try and get close. Even more stylized games like ZA don't look like them since they don't have outlines and very airbrushy shadows.
We obviously don't know much about the humans, and they at least look a little better since they limited the hair strands to textures instead of adding a second layer of strands on top of the base hair or whatever, and they only look slightly less washed out, but it's still annoying how airbrushy their shadows are. I swear, Scarlet and Violet made me think it had some of the worst human designs in the franchise, but it literally didn't. If you see how the characters look in literally any other form, whether its their official artwork or other places like Masters EX or animations, they actually have some crazy good designs. I literally looked up "pokemon scarlet and violet character" and all the images that popped up were of everyone's official artwork, because it is so obvious that that is a million times more appealing than their models. It's just the in-game models that completely ruined their image, and I feel like that's bound to happen here too. Also it's probably just because we haven't seen any actual emotion from them but these protag's in-game models has easily the worst thousand-yard-stare of the franchise so far lol
My completely baseless, overly inside-baseball headcanon is that the backlash to Sword and Shield was bad enough that they decided to stop trying that style even though it was actually peak and Pokemon fans couldn't look past one bad looking area (except it was mostly just the haters who don't care about Pokemon at all, as usual)
Anyway a lot of this stuff will surely feel a lot better in vivo while playing the actual game instead of just looking at screenshots of a trailer. If you care what I think the best Pokemon game would look like, here is a post where I splice together the prettiest parts of each existing Pokemon game. Now, at least, I can say Winds and Waves beats out New Snap for environments already, even though I do think it wouldn't mesh as well with my ideal character/Pokemon model art style.
Shocker, but I do have a lot of good things to say about WiWa too, so I might as well dump them here since I'm unemployed
Honestly the biggest upgrade over SV is the logos. Oh my god, I was so disappointed when I heard that we were getting a truly purple Pokemon game but with such an atrocious logo. It's so flat, the yellow border is weirdly super bright, even brighter than the Pokemon logo's yellow itself, and is a completely different yellow from that elaborate border around them on the game covers, AND that weird pattern in the text itself that is just so lame. It doesn't match the vibe of the games, nor does it match the vibe of the rest of the details on the game cover itself. Easily the worst logo in the franchise, even worse than ones pre-Gen 5 which were just super basic. But Winds and Waves though? They nailed it. Great depth, love that rainbow pattern behind the text, love the style of the text being much more on-theme and drawn, love the splash behind the logos, and I ESPECIALLY love that they didn't just make it a Red an Blue game again, and made Winds this kind of white-teal theme. I did saw a leak/fanart positioned as a leak that made Winds just red, which was so much worse. Teal is truly the most windy color, and I'm glad they went for it. Waves obviously has to be blue tho, so that makes sense even if it's boring. Also, love the fancy text as well. Thankfully my friend said he was more drawn to Waves so I can get Winds. Still will need to see what version exclusives we get, but the Winds logo (and protag clothing) looks so much better in Winds that it makes me want it more.
As for the starters, I don't have a clear pick since I definitely care about their final evos way more, but I do like them overall. As the resident Fuecoco Hater, whom I hate because he just feels like a bunch of simple shapes smashed together with no real anatomy (the common theme behind most modern mons I don't like) I actually think these guys have a pretty good design in that sense. Browt feels a bit too simple for me, and does just feel like a worse Rowlet until we can learn more about it, so I am gravitating towards the other two more. Maybe if Gecqua's head was just 5% smaller and its in-game colors matched the official art more I would easily choose them. I do feel like their final evo is guaranteed to either be as ugly as Quaquaval and Inteleon or basically the coolest thing ever, with no in between. I am big into cool and interesting eyelash designs, so if its evolutions expand upon that design detail I'll be satisfied.
The rest are pretty standard opinions, like I am definitely excited for true Dive gameplay in modern Pokemon, as well as the world seeming pretty expansive. I just hope we, ideally, can ride the vast majority of our own mons, which would be awesome, but if not that I'll at least take something like the classic Ride Pokemon from SM. Even though having the big legendary of the game as your main method of transportation is a good idea for gameplay, I do kinda feel like the true ideal step is to let us use the variety of existing mons to traverse the world. Maybe they'll make it so the starters are perfect for their respective mode of transportation, where their final evos are great for flying with, riding across the land, and swimming/diving with.
Obviously I have tons of other hopes for what the games could be, but that's probably better left for when we actually know anything more about the games lol
I am at least excited for Champions, but I do hope all these model and animation updates they're making will also be included in that game since it seems like it's going to be a much more long-term game than all the rest.
I've already watched each Pokemon movie at some point, but since I started slowly but surely rewatching them with a modern eye with my friend I might as well write down my thoughts on them. There's a lot of variety.
If you want to read all this somewhere else, here's the Google doc link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eCpyUy0bAi8A0gFHdR-KSkI9_vOMZTLv4Qt7oZk6eC8/edit?usp=sharing
Mewtwo Strikes Back/Evolution
Obviously, I can't say too much that hasn't already been said. Although, even though it does have to be one of the best movies, I also feel like you have to also acknowledge there's still a ton of that classic Pokemon movie cheese along with it, or at least more than some people would lead you to believe. Like, why the heck does Mewtwo's/Mew's power petrify Ash, instead of fucking obliterating him? And why do the tears of all the Pokemon suddenly heal that? And why the hell are they so concerned with him in the first place? AND why are we all of a sudden acting like Pokemon fighting each other is bad and immoral, when fighting Pokemon for sport is the crux of the whole franchise? Maybe if the normal Pokemon clearly fainted, and the clone pokemon took it an extra step further despite already having one, you could justify it. Definitely a "let's have our cake and eat it too" kind of situation, unless I'm completely missing something.
Speaking of having your cake and eating it too, I might as well put the thoughts on the remake here too. Although, here, it's more in terms of the art style instead of the story. In the grand scheme of the fandom, I actually like the style enough, but I can't deny that the juxtaposition of them trying to do a mildly realistic/detailed 3D style that ALSO tries to incorporate the proportions of the retro anime look does not mesh. At least the Pokemon themselves and the setting work well enough. I didn't bother rewatching this one so idk if there were other greater changes I forgot about, to be honest I'm not even sure if I watched it all the way through the first time either. It's one of those things that sounds like a cool enough idea in principle, but in practice I just don't really feel like giving it the light of day.
The Movie 2000
Even though I hate when people use the word in criticism, this one has to be the most forgettable. Except, of course, I do basically remember what happens, I just feel like there isn't much remarkable to say or think about it.
It at least starts the movie trend of "Some fuckass billionaire who has their own personalized flying fortress of death wants to capture the legendaries" fairly early. Since there are a lot of these, like the "older girl who tags along to help the group" and the "nerd on the sidelines who can exposition dump" I almost want to compile all of them and rank them too.
Spell of the Unown
This one definitely starts the trend of "Oh, so I guess that's one thing those guys can do I guess." Obviously the Unown are mysterious, but here they have to be like "Ok, they also grant wishes." They really need to give those guys something more to do in the games so we can actually feel their power, because they get literally no favors to make them at all useful or special.
I do have to at least give this movie props for having such a particular vibe, with the dark crystal castle and the weird events making it feel extra dreamy.
4Ever
Can't deny it, this one could be the worst. While some of the time travelling bits are kind of cool, especially with Samuel being revealed to be Professor Oak at the end, that freaky branch kaiju that Celebi forms might be one of the ugliest things I have ever seen. Like, ever.
The one major thing this one has going for it is how fucking AMAZINGLY Sneasel is drawn and animated here. Even though I joined the franchise in Gen 3, I hardly remember a time when Sneasel was as good as it got, and even though a lot of fanart made it look cool enough I just never really got into how a lot of official depictions made it look weirdly humanoid. But, THIS Sneasel is so much more beastly and cool, it actually made me draw out the difference in full. I'd say I'd want to see what Weavile looks in this style, but it's so good that it also feels like Sneasel could actually hold its own if it looked like that.
Heroes
Finally, we have immaculate vibes. As for places in the Pokemon world I'd love to live in, Alto Mare (Yes I had to look it up) is an easy second place. Second only because I'd have to guess it's not actually that practical to live in a place like Venice, despite it looking ungodly pretty. Although, maybe that's different in a world where you can just ride on the back of a human-sized bird and go wherever you want. Things like the random little water fountains designed for Pokemon to use are the little bits of worldbuilding that take a place from "Pretty" to "Utterly amazing." Although, I guess they do that for pets in our world anyway, but it at least makes you realize the world designers care. Also, if you don't want to explore that secret garden, are you even human?
Latios and Latias might be the two weirdest Pokemon designs that I'm still all-in for. I don't really know what it is about them, but it just makes me look past how they're supposed to be some kind of airplane dragon. Also, it's rare to finally get confirmation that, yes, there are tons of Latios and Latias, they're just really special and rare. It actually makes it feel like it makes sense when Ash encounters others like that Latios in Journeys and doesn't remark on any events of this movie, since there are just multiple of them around. That's how you patch a plot hole. Although, I also don't particularly care about plot holes as a whole, even though I feel like Pokemon movies & other media are the one time where I really notice them.
ALSO I really think the antagonists in this one might be the best out of all the movies, just because they're simple baddies who don't have a massive flying fortress of death, and even realize they're way in over their heads by the end. It makes them feel more like realistic evil people, instead of an impossibly grandiose billionaire.
Jirachi: Wish Maker
Even though it didn't happen to me, this movie just feels like the kind of Pokemon movie that could just weasel its way under the skin of an emotionally developing child and make it the most impactful movie of their childhood, especially since Max is made to be the main emotional core of the whole thing. Aside from that, I don't really have much to say about it myself.
They really did say "We want our own Perfect Chaos" tho.
Destiny Deoxys
First of all, Deoxys is easily my favorite legendary in the franchise. Second of all, I completely forgot that they actually didn't really make it out to be a "bad guy" much at all. I remembered it terrorizing the city, but I don't remember it doing that just because it lost its best bud. After I played through Pokemon Ranger: Guardian Signs I decided to watch some of the Ranger-related episodes of the anime too, and I didn't even know both that there were two Ranger eps involving Deoxys at all, but also that they made it out to basically be this sad, lost child. Personally, I'm much more into the unflinching, unfeeling alien threat kind of Deoxys that I had in my head, but sure.
Still, you can't deny that any time a Deoxys and Rayquaza meet, some crazy cool shit is going to go down. This movie and the Generations short are absolutely feeding people like me who live for that kind of thing.
Outside of Deoxys, there isn't all that much to say. It is at least funny how we're so careful about privacy and sharing photos of ourselves/our IDs online as companies are trying to force that down our throats, meanwhile in the Pokemon world the instant you enter a city a robot will fly right up to you, take a picture of you, and force an ID on to you. Not to mention the possibility of said robot going berserk and flooding the whole damn place with cubes. If we ever get to see that city again, I hope the people realized that being overrun with all that tech is actually a major hazard and they've reverted back to a pretty normal city.
Lucario and the Mystery of Mew
Even though it's not my personal favorite, this is the one I could totally get being someone else's favorite, or the top pick for the objectively best one in the franchise. Just under Deoxys is the Regis, so I have to give respect to them. For the life of me tho can't remember what Mew has to do with any of this.
It also makes you think about how the Pokemon world really isn't just "the human world but with magical creatures in it." You're telling me that there's a giant tree that will try and swallow you with a cell-like defense mechanism if you try to mess with it? At what point does that thing stop being "just a tree" and becomes a whole legendary Pokemon to itself? Just because it doesn't have a face and say its name out loud?
Ranger: Temple of the Sea
Remember what I said about Jirachi: Wish Maker? Yeah. This is mine.
It's so crazy how the human brain works. To me, this and Rise of Darkrai are the absolute greatest Pokemon movies, but not only could other people feel the same way about different movies, but that they could be just as indifferent to this movie as I am to the various ones before and after these. Truly, the only valid objective fact about Pokemon as a whole is "The best one is the one you grew up with as a kid." Can't wait until the Scarlet and Violet nostalgia train comes along.
Okay so anyway, first of all, I already went on a massive tirade after the aforementioned Guardian Signs playthrough about how the concept of Rangers as a whole in the Pokemon world might just be the greatest thing ever, so I'll just link that here. But, even though I mentioned it there too, Jackie's whole backstory about wanting to become a Ranger due to all the random fluffy wild Pokemon saving his life during a snowstorm basically gets me every time. There's something about the hardship-followed-by-good-ending that makes me way more emotional than just pure doom and gloom. Also, May having to give up Manaphy by the end is how I know that some guy out there feels just as emotional about Max having to give up Jirachi. For me though, Manaphy learning how to speak a little bit, instead of being perfectly capable of communication via telepathy or whatever, is what really pushes it over the edge. It's an actual baby (and not just because it just hatched).
And since I didn't even realize it at the time, but of course it's always cool when movies like this and Lucario are the ones that reveal new upcoming Pokemon. Lucario had the pleasure of revealing Mime Jr, and this one gets Buizel, so each one gets their own GOATed little guy to reveal. Obviously it would be great if modern Pokemon did more of that, even though leaks are everywhere nowadays I'm sure they could at least TRY, you know? Last we got was Ash's Dusk form Lycanroc, which personally doesn't hit quite as hard as learning about a whole new Pokemon.
I feel like I'm going to have to force myself to shut up about this one, unlike the others where I'm struggling of things to say, so here's a list of things I love: The vibes of tagging along with the travelling show caravan, the show itself being a perfect blend of human and Pokemon performance, the perfect blend of plot-relevant antagonist dodging and quiet/fun moments, obviously the design of the Sea Temple itself, all the ocean Pokemon (even Kyogre) coming along to fight alongside everyone else, and all the music being pretty good too.
Of course this movie does have one of the most "okay I guess this is what's happening now" moments, in Ash getting the Sea Crown (which I guess is the power to fly around?) and then passing the power to his friends to just do a quick little performance for everyone. Still don't really know what that's all about. After a while though, you just kind of have to accept that that's what the writers feel like doing for these movies.
The Rise of Darkrai
Even though I said all that about Temple of the Sea, if I had to choose, Rise of Darkrai would be my all-time favorite Pokemon movie, even though they're pretty close.
Younger me was OBSESSED with Darkrai, and I don't know whether this movie made that the case or if it just fed into it, but yeah. Whenever I activated my Action Replay codes in DPPt, the FIRST thing I would do would be to ghost my way to Newmoon Island to catch him. Now my edge has been smoothed over a bit, but unlike Deoxys I can totally get the vibe that Darkrai is just a misunderstood lil guy who just wants to help. A character that dark (even with Dark in their name) can't ACTUALLY be evil.
But you know what is my favorite? The Creation Trio. Truly, there is no other way to make me so utterly afraid of a Pokemon than to make them fucking gigantic gods that will try and kill each other if they even so much as glance at each other, especially to the detriment of the world around them. Thank god they're not immune to pretty music, or else a whole town's worth of people and Pokemon would've just been vaporized into the aether. And lest we forget, the most recognizable sound effect in the franchise: the Palkia Noise (tm). Even though it's a fun meme, I will always insist that it's so much better for Pokemon to make random noises instead of just saying their name. Also found this video which shows that it's actually probably using coyote yelps as a base (like how Reshiram has the sound of a loon just inserted into its anime cry)
You know what's also my favorite? Alamos town. THIS is my top pick for a place I'd want to live in in the Pokemon world. Aside from it just being very pretty, I am a big proponent of the idea that all cities need to be flushed with music like in video games, and having a giant bell tower is a major step in the right direction.
You know what's ALSO my favorite? The Sinnoh starters, and each of them gets their own dedicated human in this one. I guess another favorite is this one's dedicated battle-behind-the-theme-song in this one, since of course I want to see each of them fight. It's also great that their respective trainers are a decent part of the movie, but they also aren't THAT important. I'd have to guess in dangerous situations like this, stronger trainers like them rise to the occasion to help out anyway, they just get special character designs.
One more, my favorite "older girl who tags along to help the group." I definitely had some sort of crush on Alice as a kid, and she probably contributed to me being into long sleeves. Honestly the fact that her affection is actually being fought over in the movie probably was the reason. That, or the fact that her hair is vaguely Lopunny-like.
Every one of them has something though, and this is one of the cases where one of the main legendaries having a true voice really makes things feel extra cheesy. Like, this definitely isn't the worst case of that for sure, but Darkrai saying the moves he's using out loud is just a bit more cheesy than I'd want. Really, I can't think of a single case in these movies where things wouldn't be improved just by making the legendaries shut up. I can at least respect it in Secrets of the Jungle though where the Zarude have an actual unique language only they (and Tarzan kid) understand. Mewtwo at least is the one case where I can't really imagine him without some sort of telepathic voice, which obviously makes more sense for the pinnacle of Psychic Pokemon, but you'd also have to admit that a guy like him clearly acting sapient and in control of everything while remaining completely silent would be super intimidating.
Just kidding there's one more, you know what's my favorite badass cool-cheesy rock song that's definitely super ridiculous and unfitting for the situation but you love anyway? You already know. As a Bionicle fan, you know I'm into it.
Giratina and the Sky Warrior
Really the only Pokemon movies I engaged with naturally were Manaphy and Darkrai. All other ones were ones I basically had to watch after the fact, because even if I did remember watching them a little bit I didn't remember much.
This one isn't the worst, but definitely seems to have the worst antagonist. Dude really seems like some kid who never grew out of his edgy teenage phase. That, and the fact that he really wants to go to the Distortion world, but 1: Once he gets there he doesn't just leave things be, 2: He's totally willing to wreck it if it just means terrorizing some random kids on the surface world, and 3: Why does he even want that in the first place? He isn't some sociopath like Cyrus who wants to live in a world devoid of emotion, it's one of those cases where they just tell us what he wants and we're expected to just take it. Not only that, but he's also willing to spend billions creating the classic Flying Fortress of Death to achieve whatever he's trying to achieve. This movie was the one where it finally clicked how bizarre it is that so many movie antagonists can just get that. Not just that it's expensive, but you'd think that the government would catch on to these lunatics building stuff like that and would completely outlaw it. Most of these people aren't even people who are already in the good graces of the people and just reveal their true intentions later, Zero really just seems like some guy. He doesn't even give billionaire vibes. How the hell did he get away with any of this?
Anyway, the biggest praise I can give the movie as a whole is the fact that it's actually basically a true sequel to Rise of Darkrai, actually mentioning those events and I think even trying to explain why Dialga and Palkia collided in the first place. That's WAY more than I would expect coming from any of these movies, so you have to respect it, especially since it continues into Jewel of Life. Also, Regigigas waking up at the end to stop that glacier is easily the best part. That's honestly how all Legendary Pokemon should work, you only hear about them in legend until some major disaster occurs and then they come out of hiding to help out. Especially since it did it in tandem with all the Mamoswine, the wild Pokemon coming along to help is also always a highlight of these movies. It's like the will of nature itself is truly good.
Arceus and the Jewel of Life
Now here's one of the biggest cases of "omg please stop talking." Arceus does NOT sound like that. None of the Creation Trio talked, so neither should it. Although, considering it is God, I can at least kind of give it an in-universe pass, although I definitely think it should talk way more weirdly than it does. It should at least do the Legends: Arceus thing where they shoehorned in "Thou"s and "Thy"s and whatnot. They kind of made the God of All Things just sound like some guy.
It's also another case of "Okay but how Pokemon-like can humans get?" I forgot to mention the whole thing about Aura in the Lucario movie, but now we even have people who can "transcend the confines of time and space" just because.
It's also extremely funny to me that the brother character got completely sidelined throughout the entire adventure. Dialga really said "Not you" and just left him in Arceus' hellfire. I'm sure he and his sister had a completely normal relationship after that. Also, as for more funny things, Ash running up to Dialga and Giratina fighting over the lake. Kid, you're 10. What are you trying to do? Did he just forget he has Pokemon?
Zoroark: Master of Illusions
Since anything related to Gen 5 & up is the "modern" era of Pokemon movies in my mind, I actually think this one's pretty solid for a "modern" Pokemon movie. Zoroark being an innocent mother being tortured by a billionaire for its Fake News powers makes sense, and Zorua being a little shit actually feels like it makes sense for a dark type. Also, Celebi finally gets its movie redemption. The villain guy basically being addicted to time juice or whatever is just reasonable enough for me to take it too. And, I do love whenever shiny Pokemon make an appearance in Pokemon media, and in this case it actually makes a lot of sense since they need to differentiate between the illusion Legendary Beasts in the real one. Still doesn't make sense in the world though, unless they're trying to suggest that that classic tale about them each being reborn from nameless Pokemon that died in the Burned Tower is actually just a tall tale, and Raikou, Suicune, and Entei just populate the world like other multitudinous Legendaries.
One other thing I can say is, it's so weird to me when a character design is clearly 100% taken from an existing Pokemon but that character just, doesn't have that Pokemon. The main villain guy's hair is literally made to look exactly like a Garchomp's head, and yet he never uses one. It's basically irrelevant but I'm still baffled that they didn't give Ludlow (from Horizons) a Drampa despite being a literal Drampa gijinka. Like, why? Why would you so overtly reference a Pokemon in their design and yet they don't even have it? Did they just accidentally style themselves like that? Someone should tell them.
Victini and Zekrom/Reshiram
Not gonna lie, this one might be the worst. At least with 4Ever it was early in the lifespan of Pokemon movies as a whole, but here they should know better. As I was rewatching it, I couldn't help but realize what we were dealing with.
First of all, I can enjoy the cutesy antics of meeting the little legendary guy and messing around in town as much as the next guy, but there isn't even a single speck of greater conflict until a whole third of the movie is over. Every other movie starts off saying "Hey, some dire shit is about to go down, but first here's some fun!" Meanwhile here, they don't let on that even a single thing is wrong or in need of changing at all until later. They kind of had some sort of conflict at the start where Damon needed to help protect some People of the Vale, but it's literally just from a herd of Pokemon/a glacier. I guess the point they're trying to make is that the People of the Vale shouldn't be there, hence why their settlements were at risk? Even then, it's the Pokemon World, why are you shocked when a herd of Pokemon is doing Pokemon things?
And that's also kind of why Damon's plan is so weird. He wants to move the giant sword castle back to its original location, so… these whole groups of people can uproot their homes and go back to where their ancestors lived? Buddy, it's been centuries, they've established themselves in new places and formed new cultures, you're not going to change that just by moving a castle. And, even if he was just like "If we move the castle back, that land will become livable again!" then like, what's the issue? That seems like a completely reasonable plan. Why not just let him do that? If the castle can fly, why can't it just move around every few years?
Answer: because there's some made-up magic coming from the ground that'll destroy literally all of nature if the castle that's plugging its hole is ever moved. Did Damon really just think "nah I'm built different" and ignored all warnings? Did they even warn him? It seems like the Dragonforce (there are a million jokes to make) is pretty fundamental in the backstory of the whole area, so how did this guy, who clearly cares about the history of this place, not know about that? And even worse, the only reason why he went full psycho mode while actually moving the castle is because it was a cloudy day and he couldn't see the Dragonforce spilling everywhere. Literally, once they told the legends to clear a hole in the clouds, he sees the destruction he's causing and is like "shitshitshitSHITSHIT" and tries to reverse it. But, OF COURSE this magic castle that's only really flying because of a bunch of Psychic Pokemon can't possibly be controlled, and instead of just like, doing something normal, instead decides to fly off into space, shoehorning in more danger, and gives Victini a free fake-out death. Also, why does Damon even need to force Victini to do all of whatever it's doing? In the legend they tell you, it seems like Victini did all of that out of its own will, so why did he not even ask? Why didn't they even put in a single scene of Victini trying to resist? They just tossed it in the classic electric orb and zapped it until the deed was done.
I still think Zero is the worse villain, because it at least feels like Damon is a kind of reasonable human, but it's just the whole situation that makes the movie feel worse overall. Also, one really, impossibly stupid thing I noticed, which was even ridiculous by Pokemon movie standards, was that all the main characters were just outside while the actually important people were expositing and all. Like, it's not even a case where they hadn't met yet, they were literally already a group, and Ash and co just decided to walk outside while the only pieces of important info in the whole movie were being revealed. Did they forget that it would've been completely free for them to at least be within earshot, so they could remark upon the stories and info like they have for every other movie? That's literally the point of characters like them, they don't know things so other characters tell them (and us, by extension) all about it. It actually baffled me when I was watching it.
Anyway, that's enough ranting about kids' movies. I can at least say one thing, which idk if it's even a hot take, but I actually think the gimmick of releasing two movies with slight differences was kind of cool. But, that's only because they did it exactly once. If it ever happened again, or, god forbid, it became the new norm, it would get really dumb and tiring real fast. As a one-off concept, its interesting. Although, for one, they made me choose between seeing my boy Reuniclus and also one of the coolest shinies out there (Golurk) so fuck em, but also I feel like it can kind of mess with the story too, since Zekrom and Reshiram are so ideologically-coded legendaries. You mean to tell me these two ideologically clashing beings can fall for the same guy so long as a couple of his lines are changed? It makes their whole purpose feel kind of shallow in the end. Also, I can never remember which one is Truth and which one is Ideals. Since neither concept can really be conveyed in their visual design, I'm left in the dust. Personally I think Damon should have whoever the Ideals one is, since he ideally wants the People of the Vale to return to their original home, but the truth of the situation is that he can't have that/it's not that easy.
Oh and one last thing which isn't really movie-specific, but Cilan is really the most "bro thinks people really give a shit about him huh" character ever made.
Kyurem VS the Sword of Justice
My god, you'd think a 70 minute movie wouldn't have this much filler. It's actually shocking how much random nothing happens half the time, especially with what feels like the longest title-song intro of all the movies. A little bit of song while the characters silently talk is one thing, but it just went on and on.
Also, this is easily the most egregious case of talking Legendaries, easily. I knew that the Swords of Justice all talked, but I completely forgot that Kyurem also talked. Bro could not stop constantly grunting. Half way through the movie I realized, out of all the legendaries so far, I feel like it would make the most sense for the Swords of Justice to just straight up talk. Like, they're animated like they're using the usual telepathy, but there are moments where like Terrakion laughs out loud, or Keldeo comes along to say "I heard everything you said." Stuff like that almost makes me think they half considered this as a Mystery Dungeon movie at first, because I hear that the big bad of Gen 5's Gates to Infinity is Kyurem too. This Kyurem even makes Keldeo pass through a Gate to challenge him.
And that's the other thing, why does Kyurem actually seem kind of honorable? Keldeo challenged him to a fair fight, and when the other Swords broke the rules, he punished them, and pursued Keldeo to finish the fight. And why was he the final test for the Swords of Justice? He sure as hell didn't seem like he was harming anyone just hanging out in his mountain, so he wasn't some threat that the Swords protect against. Cobalion and Virizion both also respect the terms of his challenge. I just don't get what's going on here. Kyurem definitely has pretty evil vibes, like he's the ideologically bereft husk of the Original Dragon. But, no, he's totally content terrorizing a city to finish a fight, but I guess once the kid that challenges him proves he's willing to sacrifice himself for his friends, he's totally chill now. It really made it seem like the only two ways to finish the challenge was for either him or Keldeo to straight up die, and Keldeo just got in over his head, but I guess not.
Oh yeah, and Kyurem can just become Black/White no matter what? It doesn't even have to absorb Zekrom or Reshiram? Lame. Follow your rules, people.
That being said, I feel like I was pretty close to liking this movie. I feel like if they cut off like at least 20 minutes or so, and had at least one training battle between Keldeo and Ash so Keldeo's character arc actually made more sense, I would've actually loved it. Keldeo is probably the most Ash-coded legendary out there, so they are a perfect match. I also loved how they animated Keldeo to be so acrobatic, doing things like diving under Kyurem to buck upwards, or use his jet hooves to fly.
Actually that reminds me of one other weird thing I noticed, which was when Cobalion referred to Keldeo as "it." Obviously I know that people can want to just use it/its pronouns, and it makes sense to refer to some Pokemon as "it" in the sense they don't really have true person-hood, but for one… some Pokemon clearly do have person-hood, and it's extra weird when said Pokemon refers to other personable Pokemon with "it." I don't know, it was just a weird thing I noticed.
Also weird is how a couple of children can commondeer a whole fucking blimp from a museum and the one kid who seems the least tech-savvy out of all of them even knows how to drive it, and that she doesn't die when a dragon of ice freezes it solid. It's also crazy how so much of this movie is just diversion plots.
If I had to rewrite it, Keldeo challenges Kyurem, the Swords intervene and get frozen and Keldeo flees in fear. But, Kyurem doesn't pursue, but just keeps the Swords frozen to himself. So, Keldeo still has to defeat Kyurem to get the Swords back, but it has the time to actually grow and learn with Ash before then. Also, instead of just being able to transform at will, Zekrom and Reshiram appear before the final battle to lend Kyurem their power for its transformation to fully test Keldeo. That would've been way more badass. If Kyurem isn't even really that bad, why not?
Genesect and the Legend Awakened
This might be the one movie I feel like I remembered the least about, even to the point where I wonder if I ever watched it at all. I swear I binged every Pokemon movie at some point.
Genuinely, this would actually be a pretty good movie… if none of the Genesect talked. When the red one talked I was like "omg, I had no idea they talked" and then the cutesy little one talked and I was like "WHAT NO. COME ON." It's so tantalizing too, because the noises they make when not talking are basically perfect for them. Maybe I'll let the red one talk, but the one with the Douse Drive sounding like a human child just feels so stupid. Its body language is so overtly different from the rest they do not need that voice to let you know it's supposed to be the "nice" one. Or, at least, if they all do have to talk, then just make them use simple roboty language or something. This ancient bug cyborg should not just sound like a human. Mewtwo has kind of the same problem, where her voice sounds just too normal. At least with Mewtwo it makes a bit more sense though. At some point I also realized, that could totally just be the same Mewtwo from the first movie, since really there's no reason why telepathy wouldn't let you just change your voice to whatever. Maybe the OG Mewtwo is just exploring her gender identity.
Anyway, aside from the Genesect voices, I actually think this one was pretty good, mainly because it was so simple and straightforward. It's just a bunch of disorientated cannon bugs filled with hatred for their new forms trying to find a place in the new age. It even makes perfect sense for Mewtwo to be paired with them, since they are both manmade creatures of destruction. I definitely loved the speed battles between Mega Mewtwo and the red Genesect. Mewtwo's time stop effect and the red Genesect's jagged movements and speed lines were pretty cool.
The worst parts were just kind of nitpicks, like why would the Genesect's nest mess with the power transformer that much, and why would a whole city rely on one single transformer that isn't even in a remote location, but under a giant garden with supernatural animals that can shoot laser beams on a whim? It's also crazy how the city they were in was just straight up New York, the only unique part being the giant megastructure inside of Madison Square Garden. Even Castelia city wasn't that overtly New York. Also, the red Genesect being pacified just by being brought up into space felt a little cheesy, but to be fair, if a person witnessed a sunrise while orbiting the Earth and came back the exact same person, I'd question whether or not they had a soul.
I also didn't know the explicitly showed Genesect's fossil, since one of the classic Game Theories is about what it used to be was that it used to be a Kabutops. Clearly, it's just something else. It is a very Pokemon thing to say that "oh no, we shouldn't have brought you back into modern times! How horrible!" meanwhile it clearly seems like every other fossil Pokemon is completely chill with existing in modern times, even ones like Amaura seamlessly returning to nature. Maybe in the Japanese version they specified about the whole cyborg thing being the thing that was bad. I do kind of wish that Team Plasma actually did something in the movie, you'd think they'd come looking for their superpowered experiment.
Diancie and the Cocoon of Destruction
Honestly just remember this for being simple fun, since Diancie is just really cute.
The intro battle VS Mega Absol obviously slaps, and I love seeing the Ace Trainer class in the anime. Same goes for the main antagonists (aside from Yveltal) using the starter trio
For some reason I had the impression that those differently styled Carbink were somehow distributed in the games and had different stats, like the one with big fluff has extra defense, and the one with spiky fluff has extra speed/attack. I don't even know how I could've gotten that idea, it could've been a dream or something.
Hoopa and the Clash of Ages
I definitely like Hoopa, but I can see how this is just a free-for-all for fun. Considering Pokemon movies never really have an insanely perfect story to begin with, might as well just go bonkers and have every legend fight every other legend.
Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel
Honestly pretty good, although Volcanion feels like a weird choice for the "protector of nature" role. It feels like the type of Pokemon that was forged in a lab and used for evil, not just some good-natured guy that just sort of exists. Also Magearna is adorable.
Also these new major side characters have the best fashion sense. I can't not love the white/black/color/gold look.
The Movie: I Choose You!
Honestly, everything about this movie feels so weird. I feel it makes enough sense to give the movies their own continuity, and give Ash a new origin story, but all the random changes they made just feel off.
Verity and Sorrel (their names don't even feel real) feel like such basic "Let's make a Pokemon Character" types. Verity and various other girls that look like her (like the New Snap girl or whatever) all feel so generic, there's no way any of them could really take. Sorrel is probably one of the most "no way that's a 10 year old" characters in the whole franchise, which is really saying something. Even that guy Cross (biggest joke of a name) is just sort of there. I like the idea of Charmander's ex-trainer being an actual antagonist instead of just some random guy, but he still just feels weird. It's also crazy how all of these roles could easily be filled by the classic companions of Misty, Brock, and Gary. They're basically the exact same characters, except minor personality differences, and Gary obviously needing to have Squirtle instead of Charmander. I feel like it's made so much worse by them just leaving by the end of the movie. If they at least became recurring characters for the next two movies, then maybe they'd have some chance to justify their existence, but being one-off sidekicks is just so lame.
Marshadow having this super specific role of being this guardian for Ho oh feels like it makes no sense. Why is he even here? Why is he even doing this? Why are they acting like he has so much deep-set lore in this world when that's never mentioned in any other version of him? Half the time it also seems like he's being straight-up evil and messing with Ash, but I guess in the end he's supposed to help like test the Rainbow Hero or whatever? It all just feels so made up, like more so than usual.
And there are so many other little weird things, like the fact that Team Rocket is in this movie, but they never interact with Ash directly ONCE. You'd think as a whole new origin story, they'd at least have one interaction where they meet for the first time, but no, they're literally just chasing the same legends the main characters are. They don't even care about Ash's Pikachu. It's like they wrote them in just because returning fans would know them and didn't even bother actually incorporating them into the one story where they should actually do something, even if it's just a single scene. Honestly they should take like 90% of the runtime of that weird no-Pokemon dream sequence and give it to them.
But like even then, it's still better than like a solid third of these Pokemon movies. It just feels so much more clean than a lot of them. I do think something like this would've worked so much better as a short series, like Origins was. Then they could hit all the same episode references, and even have some more, while making the whole thing feel more normal.
The Power of Us
The levels of corniness are actually out of control. They seriously gave every single character their own special little trauma dump moment, and most of their "trauma" was basically the most kiddie levels of "I lie a lot…" or "I know I'm bad at talking…" while depressing music plays and everyone's crying. I was thinking it was all going to tie back to Lugia seeing their newfound bonds and THAT being the thing that makes it come back, but no, apparently it literally just responds to some lamp at the top of a stadium. When it went out, its first thought was "oh, well I guess they don't want the wind anymore" instead of "uhhhh hey guys, you alright?" Dude could've whisked away both the Effect Spore cloud AND the fire all in a single gust. Even on top of that, Zeraora could've lightning-teleported straight to the top of the stadium, but the foot girl had to get her Moment (tm), despite the fact that by the time she got there, most of this stuff was already solved. Congrats on the confidence boost I guess, just kept a whole city in a coma for a bit longer.
This whole movie does almost feel like it's supposed to be a Let's Go style
introduction to the series for people who don't know the franchise, so it obviously can serve its purpose as that, but it definitely makes it feel pretty basic to anyone else. No crazy or interesting legendary lore, no bigger villain, it's basically just a bunch of really dire accidents in a row as an excuse to bring a handful of characters who we'll only ever see once together one time. Maybe if I knew that any of these characters would ever appear again, this would be more impactful, but since they don't it's just like they shotgunned a bunch of shoehorned backstory in my face and then tossed it by the end.
I might've not been so irony-poisoned if both didn't watch the English dub and watch it with my friend, but yeah I am definitely too irony-poisoned to truly take this one seriously lol
Secrets of the Jungle
Honestly, was pleasantly surprised with this one. I think the fact that it was ultimately straightforward, but still had its big moments like you'd hope from a Pokemon movie, made it feel so much more solid than the other movies. Even though it's one more thing that makes you question whether it's ethical to zap a Pokemon like Zarude into a Pokeball and force it to fight other people's pets, I really like how they made the Zarude an actual people where they actually tried to design multiple Zarude individuals instead of them all looking the exact same. Also, the fact that they are speaking an actual language, instead of just using telepathy. But, again, it makes you wonder how they can talk to Pokemon, despite the fact that they're still talking a completely unique language comparable to humans… Honestly these are just the things the Pokemon world itself has to deal with, like now if Koko can use Jungle Healing, that's another barrier between humans and Pokemon that's being torn down. Honestly the day they actually try to set up concrete lore about what Pokemon are relative to humans will probably be the most interesting day in the franchise, they're basically just shooting the breeze at every moment.
Also like, holy fuck why was Zed the most utterly psychopathic villain of all the movies? Like we better be glad bro only wanted to prove he was right, and he didn't want to capture the Creation Trio and destroy the world or something. He'll kill a whole family just because they want to respect a couple of Pokemon. Someone better tell Zygarde, he's giving Zs a bad name.
And I guess that's all of them. I feel like we started watching these over a year ago, and there's still absolutely 0 sign of any new Pokemon movies coming out. Although, I guess since it's a couple of weeks before Pokemon Day 2026, it'll be easier to say that with confidence after then, since they could have something cooking up for the 30th anniversary.
Honestly, as for what I want, I'm the kind of guy who'd totally love an MCU style post-credits scene at the end of Horizons where Liko encounters an older Ash, and the movie is them doing something together. But, considering I both am sold on Horizons itself, as well as all the Poketoon shorts/other short series they put out, I could totally go for a completely bespoke Pokemon story. Considering Secrets of the Jungle was technically set during the England generation, they clearly will just do whatever the hell they feel like. I'll just take anything man, I feel like even though a lot of the existing movies were kind of mid, the medium itself is a good way to tell a story. Even if the stories had a lot of weird points, it's definitely better for them to take big swings with the lore and setting so they can try for something interesting. Although, as many people often say, you have to enjoy the more pedestrian-level Pokemon stories too, which just show the Pokemon world in a much more average way. Basically that whole paragraph to say "yeah anything will work" lol, almost like good storytelling relies on the small-scale writing instead of the big worldbuilding types of writing
That all being said, as is usual with the franchise, my top picks are still Manaphy and Darkrai. The best Pokemon-anything is the one you grew up with.
Genuinely, one of the things I love the most about TADC is that I genuinely have no idea how it's going to end. Like, even when I'm enjoying a show, I have a couple of ideas on how it's going to end, and usually the actual ending falls into one of those lines (unless they try to set up for a new season only to get cancelled cough cough). But, like, I genuinely have no idea what's going to happen in TADC. Goosworx has proven herself to be an enigma of a writer in her other projects, so I feel like any thought I have could just be completely out the window by the time the show actually comes to an end. I do have some ideas on how some parts of the show will be by the end, which is kind of the same but also kind of not.
They're not going to leave the Circus. After episode 7, I really feel like the ending of the show is going to be more like "We're stuck here, but that's fine" more so than a "We're free!" That being said, I feel like there is a decent chance that they will leave, but it'll cut to credits right as they go into the light or whatever, I definitely don't think we'll actually see them all as humans. Jax's suburban flashbacks suggest that the "real world" would just end up being live action, and I don't think they would actually try to have live action actor versions of the characters. At best it would just be a shot of the headset on the desk, maybe with some shadows and chatter in the background.
If anyone's going to abstract, it'll be Kinger. Up until this point it seemed like Abstraction was just a character going crazy, which I think Kinger was basically immune to because of how he's either pretty calm or completely oblivious. But now it definitely seems like it's much more like Caine has some direct part in it, so no one's off the table. Second place will probably be Zooble, but since they're seeming much more at ease in general, I feel like Kinger will be the main target. I think if it turns out that Kinger permanently gets back his intelligence, he'll probably turn against Caine a lot more, and that'll make Caine snap and abstract him. Just guessing tho. I do feel like, narratively, he'll be the most impactful one to abstract, since he's such an emotional core for everyone else. It would at least be interesting to see the characters reacting to Jax abstracting, although I feel like that's one of those major red herrings, since he's so obviously close to abstraction that it's distracting us from how things actually work.
Everyone's backstories are going to remain vague. At most, I feel like we'll get some sort of scene of Jax breaking down and talking about Ribbit, but I definitely don't think there will be much more than that, maybe some slight details about how he was in real life. I definitely don't think it's in the shows bones to infodump that much in just 2 episodes. Plus, it's just much more lame to spell everything out, and I feel like Goose doesn't go the lame route.
The Circus's creation is going to remain vague. Kind of the same thing as the last point, but yeah. We'll probably just get to know that the company C&A is real despite the misdirections of Ep 7, and Kinger took part in making it probably along with some others, but I doubt there will be much more than that. The ending is going to focus more on the characters and their relation to the world than the lore of it.
Caine is going to die/be destroyed. I genuinely don't think there's an ending where Caine survives/persists. Goose says the ending is at least positive in some way, and I think Caine is way too laser-focused on being in control of everything to allow a positive ending to happen. Even if he does realize his wrongs, he'll probably end up deleting himself to allow the humans to ACTUALLY enjoy the Circus. I feel like there's a solid chance that no one will abstract, but Caine is definitely not going to make it.
The Abstracted people aren't going to be healed. Goose seemed to make it pretty clear early on that Abstraction is truly permanent, and I definitely don't think she'll go back on something like that. Maybe, at most, if one of the characters we know is starting to abstract, something could prevent them from it going all the way through, but yeah we're not getting any of the past characters back. I would at least love a flashback scene of some of them animated in full, but I don't expect that kind of a thing.
Some new character is going to join in the last seconds of the show. Obviously much more in the air, but it'll be more fun if it actually happens. Everyone will be having a good time, probably messing around in an adventure of their own creation, and a totally new guy is going to pop in and look at them like "huh? where am I?" and they all look at each other, and cut to credits. Mark my words.
I legit have no idea what's up with Bubble. He feels so much more important than any old NPC, and him being second to Caine feels like there HAS to be something there. I kind of like the theory that Bubble was a much more powerful AI, but Caine nerfed him to have all the power to himself. I don't even know how true that could be, since Bubble always seems 100% fully just a comedic sidekick to Caine. The only shred of "this is a character to be earnestly thought about" is the bit of him struggling to hold up the camera. Every other moment just suggests that Bubble is just some random joke. I have no idea what's going to happen to him.
It does feel like the overall theme of the show is something along the lines of "We're all stuck on this bitch of an Earth against our will, so friendship is the way to survive" or whatever. Something like that. I feel like most of the ending will follow through with that idea.
Looking back on my last All Pokemon tier list made me realize how off some choices were so I made it again. Kinda wish I could sort in the ZA megas but whatever
This is the one I used if you care: https://tiermaker.com/create/every-pokmon-including-scarlet-and-violet-15552321
Guys there legitimately had to have been some sort of cosmic hit piece put out about this game. It's EXTREMELY fun. Yeah, obviously it would've been nicer if the city was prettier, and obviously it would've been better if you could go to more places (I was thinking it would've been awesome if you could just go to the routes connecting to Lumiose), but like, I legitimately think everything else was just as good as it had any right to be. It's kind of impossible to rank it right now because I'm running off the hype of the story finale, but it is up there for me.
So yeah here I am to dump every thought I have on things. I'll try to keep the true spoilers till later. This is gonna be a long one. I'll reserve spoilers/MEGA spoilers for later.
Google Doc alt if you like reading there more
Graphics
Let's start with the obvious, because it's the one everyone cares about I guess. Again, yeah, it would've been better if the city itself had less flat buildings. But, also, after a while you kinda stop giving a shit. For the windows, the ones near the top of buildings that you'll never get truly close to might as well be flat since they're just filler set pieces, but I do also think they really shouldn't have let the windows near the floor be THAT flat. I don't remember seeing it myself, but I did see a screenshot where one ground-floor window had like a little flower bush on it, which feels extra bad since that's the kind of 3D element that definitely would be popping out off the wall. Normal windows can just be flat, but some things do kind of need to pop out. But, again, after a while I just kind of stopped caring. You know what one thing I do care about?
Pop-in. Just in general. I'm actually baffled that devs can just get away with having nothing in the distance, and it just popping in when you get near it. I did kind of get used to it here, but after playing Sonic Frontiers I actually got radicalized on this shit. It's so fundamentally annoying, especially in a game like that where you're supposed to be moving fast, and since that game specifically is trying to be more realistic. But, in ZA, it's kind of an even weirder case, since it seems super uneven, like loose buildings like those little kiosks pop in way farther away than some people, and some people actually load in way in the distance, but then vanish, only to fade back in with the more intended pop-in style. I was even planning to record it and post it, where I saw some kids gathered around a Holovator, so I moved close to them and they vanished as usual… but never reappeared. I literally saw ghost children. They were probably tied to a side quest or something that I either completed or didn't progress far enough in yet, but idk. I did see a Switch 1/2 comparison where the 1's pop-in was worse, but it definitely could've been way better on the 2.
But you know what? That's basically where my gripes with the graphics end. You know where in the game is specifically really pretty? ALL of the building interiors. Every single one actually looked seriously good, including the sewers too. The lobby room of Rancine construction specifically had some nice light rays coming from the windows, which, technically didn't interact with your character model in the most realistic way, but they still looked amazing. The sewers have a perfect amount of bump mapping around every inch, where not a single part felt especially plain or flat. That one spoiler location? So much detail. Hell, even all the stuff happening during the big final story fight looked amazing. It seriously feels like they just shirked on the outside for some reason. But, even then, AGAIN, I still was able to just take it.
As for the Pokemon, I do still wish we went back to the more flat shading of Sword and Shield for example, but I still much prefer this style to Scarlet and Violet. Pokemon are inherently stylized creatures, so trying to give them fur/scale/metal textures just looks weird to me, so I hope they try to go down this route more for Gen 10. Also, the best addition: the rim light on all of them. I am a SUCKER for a good rim light, and I honestly think that if they're not going to add back in an outline like SWSH I'll gladly take a rimlight to fill a similar function. Also also, you do really feel that there are so many more animations for everything. I think I can officially say we're out of the Sky Battle apocalypse. Every flying (as in, not flying type) mon has both flying animations AND grounded animations as necessary. Seeing mons like Salamence land is just so fundamentally cathartic. Even its Mega lands, and that was one designed more to be permanently airborne. I also love the rainbow aura that Mega Pokemon have now, I think it really helps distinguish them from their normal forms (especially when their Megas don't change much, STARMIE).
As for the trainers, I do love all the bespoke character designs a lot, but I will also say I think the random trainer types and the variations of those might be some of the ugliest in the series. I think the collector(?) trainer with the Ultra Ball hair might be my least favorite trainer class in the entire franchise, I just hate looking at him. Also, while some trainer types look fine, like the default Hex Maniac we saw in the trailers, her alt looks are actually so weird and jarring to me, especially the one with lighter clothing/hair. And the male trainers with those massive anime eyes also look weird, although when it comes to those backpackers with the massive beards, it honestly kind of fits, I kind of feel like there are people IRL that feel like they have massive and pretty eyes like that. Basically, we peaked at Sword and Shield trainers (if you don't qualify the 2D art of Gen 6). At least when characters were ugly there, they were an appealing kind of ugly, you know? I really don't like this generation's overall trainer in-game model design. It's like they wanted them to be slightly more realistic, despite, again, Pokemon being an inherently stylized franchise. As per my big post where I splice together the best parts of every Pokemon game, I still think the main game's trainers need to look more like Masters EX trainers. That's the absolute perfect style to match the style of the Pokemon.
But, again, I think the bespoke character designs are all amazing. Jacinthe specifically became one of my top favorite characters the instant I saw a pic of her. She's got that classic Fairy-type lunacy about her. Corbeu might be one of the best overall characters in the whole franchise. I mean I could just list them all off so I won't, but I can also appreciate Phillipe looking good despite being like the only non-skinny major character in the game.
But oh my god the CUSTOMIZATION. I swear to god they themselves felt so limited by SV's ass level of customization that they just went insane with this one. It's actually great that they give you so many freebie potions and stuff, because I legit spent hundreds of thousands of PokeDollars (still don't know if they have a name) just buying clothes. All the purple clothes in the game were that perfect shade for me, and I screamed a little inside when the default MC's massive pants also came in purple. I did post some of them here, but there were so many good options that I changed it up at basically every major story beat. I did want to use the OG MZ jacket for the big final fight, but the only piece of clothing that I found that could match that shade of green were headphones, which still looked good, but I wish there were more. Even aside from the insane choices, the UI of choosing clothes is the best it's ever been, where you first choose the style of clothes, and THEN the color, and where each purchase you make often includes both the main color of the thing but also the color of some accessory that comes along with it, like the belt, which you can change separately. Long gone are the days where you have to wade through each color alt of each piece of clothing to get to every other piece of clothing. They fed us so hard that they basically have to keep up stuff at this level for me to be satisfied. Literally the only thing I want now is to be able to save outfit presets. Since there's so much variety, that would be insanely nice.
Might as well put the music here too. It's definitely really good, although I can at least say that a lot of it doesn't outright replace the music it remixed, it more just adjusted its vibe to fit the new scenario more. Like, I do think I prefer the old Lumiose theme to this one in terms of just wanting to listen to a song, but I do think this Lumiose theme is way better since it's the one theme you're going to be hearing the most while just wandering around. Holy hell though, I did NOT expect the sewer theme to go that hard. That is one I think did replace the old theme (the cave theme). That and its battle version were some of the best music in the whole game. That and Jacinthe's theme. They did NOT have to go that hard. I did feel some stinkers though, like I don't really like Ivor's normal theme (although I do like his battle theme), and I think Corbeu's battle theme is just straight up too hard to listen to. I also didn't really like the Elite 4 themes of Kalos/Alola at first though, so maybe remixes will get me to like that one a bit more. It's obviously extremely intimidating. Anyway, it's insane that Insaneintherain, a guy who I've followed for years, actually worked on the music. Once I realized that I instantly heard his exact saxophone in one of the songs (it was the Night Lumiose theme, I think). It's cool to see them bringing in guest musicians for these games, like him and Toby Fox (and one other guy I think worked on this soundtrack that I don't know).
Gameplay
The one thing I think most people need to hear about this game is that, if you were one of those people absolutely clamoring for following Pokemon in modern games, this is EXACTLY what you wanted. Not only do your Pokemon follow perfectly behind you, but them following behind you is integrated so seamlessly with all of the mechanics of the world and battles.
First off, the new sort of HM-esque roadblocks. They finally did it, they perfected it. The key now is that HMs themselves are still gone, but there are still roadblocks that require some specific move type/power to break. I don't know the exact mechanics in full, but I at least know for rocks, most Fighting type moves can break them, but also moves like Liquidation. Sludge is removed mostly by water type moves, and brambles are mostly removed by fire type moves. It's so easy to just send your Pokemon out and break a blockade with a move you already use. This means you don't have to have an HM slave, or even have to think about making someone on your team worse for a second just to get somewhere. But also, you're not just summoning some public-service mon to get it done for you, you are using YOUR Pokemon to help YOU. They unfortunately don't have any kind of Surf mechanic though which sucks, if we can eventually be able to ride on our own mons' backs to cross water we will finally be in absolute peak territory.
But also, the battles, of course. It's so easy to just send your mon off to attack a wild or trainer mon and trigger a battle, where afterwards they'll come right back to your side. That much is pretty much as you'd expect, but one even better thing is that Megas persist after battles, so you can Mega Evolve once and fight multiple Pokemon with it before the timer runs out. You can even Mega Evolve just for the sake of like, taking a selfie with them. It's so perfect. Megas as a whole have been improved so much. You can even use up some of your Mega Meter to use a Plus attack, which is just a more powerful attack, if you just need that extra little bit to knock someone out and don't want to fully Mega Evolve/don't have a full meter. They also give you so many Mega stones, although of course the biggest and newest ones tend to be locked behind story events or Rouge Mega fights, but also you can get them all before the big finale. It's insane to think that most of them were locked to the post game in Gen 6. What a lame decision.
As for the battle system, I LOVE it. Everything is so hectic, I sometimes find myself frozen having to make a choice super fast, which sounds bad but as a Pokemon Veteran who knows all there is to know about battling it is super refreshing to both have to test out moves to see their new mechanics, and to have to make quick decisions. Just that alone means I can't just blaze through the game like I have before (I technically did do completely fine but I did get way closer to losing in some parts, which actually made the NPCs fights feel way more difficult). I did also realize, though, that because of all that, I think this might be the least approachable game for Pokemon newbies. It's already hard enough for them to remember type effectiveness, so making them do all that but WAY faster is bound to keep some people away from trying it. I definitely don't see them actually making the main series games use this type of battling though, I'd just have to guess that they'll take the more open vibes of the battles than uprooting the whole battle style.
I also love how the Legends games are really keeping alive the actual reason why people need Pokemon by their side to leave town. It is way more interesting when you also have to dodge attacks of Pokemon, not even just Rogue Megas or Alphas. Those Bunnelby in Zone 1 want you dead too. It is also insane though how Quasartico really just said "You know what the people of Lumiose need? A whole pack of vicious Pyroar right outside their door! Yay for people and Pokemon!" They really are just a bunch of disillusioned corporate maniacs.
As for all the side quests, some were fine, but a lot really just seemed to be "Hey, battle me" which was kind of annoying since they don't increase their levels based on where you are in the game, meaning if you don't knock them out immediately when they appear it'll just be a nonsense fluff battle in the future. I can at least appreciate the ones that try to teach you about new ways to use moves, although they still get trounced easily.
It does feel like things like stats and statuses have kind of been neutered a bit, I only ever used stat moves in the early game when there was nothing else to do BUT use them, but it never really felt like they were doing much since you can't stack them, and that they're temporary. I'm sure ones like Dragon and Quiver Dance are still amazing though since boosting both attack and speed has to go crazy. As for statuses, again they don't feel too damaging. Obviously if Burn and Paralysis still completely halve Attack/Speed, then they have to be must-uses, but I'd have to guess they just do a -1 in their stats. Maybe Toxic still is useful, since it'll keep getting worse as you're worrying about everything else. I seriously just need some VGC master to come along and let me know what is great now and what isn't worth your time, I really have no idea anymore.
Other
I kind of felt like the overall vibes of the story were a bit more mature than past games. Obviously it isn't like this dark, gritty hellscape, but compared to the sheer kiddiness of past games, it's a nice step up. Obviously can't talk about major spoilers until the spoiler section though, but I definitely liked the vibe much more. I really felt the calming vibes of travelling to a new city and finding a comfy place in a nice little hotel.
People are acting like the city is small, and like sure maybe in raw surface area, but for me as I was playing it it felt sufficiently big enough. Obviously bigger is better still, but I feel like the people saying that are definitely the ones who didn't actually buy the game and just are looking on from afar with extremely judgemental eyes. I do wish there were more building interiors though of course, since the other ones were so pretty, as mentioned.
Also as for the long tutorial, yeah they could've given us more free reign, but honestly I don't think it was as bad as people were saying. People are like "omg it's a 2 hour tutorial" meanwhile it's only 2 hours if you spend half of that time just running around the two early routes, catching and battling the same mons over and over again. If you just do what the characters say, then you'll be out of it in like an hour at most, and you'll be free to do literally whatever you want. Obviously an hour is still too long, again, but I really feel like people are being whiny babies about it. You know, to put it in the most unnecessarily hostile way possible of course. That's how discourse online works right?
As for Mega designs, as a resident Starmie Lover I gotta say that I am way not into Mega Starmie. I feel like they pulled a Dudunsparce but with a mon that isn't as inherently kinda lame (but in a positive way, ofc) as Dunsparce. There were like a million possible insanely amazing ideas in my head for a Mega Starmie, but in reality it's literally just Starmie but with longer legs, as the leaks said. I can take it being kind of goofy and humanoid, I mostly just hate how it is LITERALLY just Starmie with longer legs. Not even the shiny colors were changed. I was thinking of doing my own redesign, but I actually think this one is both more what I'd want mixed with what the actual design is. I can at least appreciate that other people are enjoying it though. As a Pokemon fan traumatized by boundless negativity, I'll gladly take any overall positivity and clutch it to my chest so it'll never leave me.
As for the other ones, my end team was Barbaracle, Froslass, Scolipede, Eelectross, Dragalge, and Mawile (still the GOAT). Much like Legends Arceus where I used all Hisuian Forms/Evolutions, I obviously wanted to use all Megas, since they were both more plentiful, easier to get, AND it's even more reasonable to have multiple Megas on your team because of how Megas work now. I love all of them, and I like most of the other Megas enough too (although ones like Pyroar are pushing it). I am shocked that people are acting like Barbaracle's Mega was one of the worst, I honestly like it. As the resident Barbaracle Defender, I had to use it just because I knew few others would. I even caught an Alpha to make it as big as I expected it to be when I first saw it. I feel like my favorite new Mega though might be Delphox (but Banette is still my overall top), and, say it with me folks, it is super dumb that it is relegated to not only the multiplayer battle ranking rewards, but also limited to a LATER SEASON of ranking. Honestly, I would've been fine with it if you could get all Kalos starter Mega Stones by doing the multiplayer battle stuff, since you could technically get them before finishing the main story, but making it so you have to wait like a whole month to get it at all is just the shit icing on the mud cake. I at least hope they'll do a more special distribution later to give us all those stones, because otherwise they'll be super limited. Maybe the DLC will give us them in a more normal fashion.
Uh oh, I said it, I mentioned the DLC. Here we go. Another stupid shitstorm for nothing. Yeah, it's kind of dumb to announce a paid DLC for a game that isn't out yet, but I feel like the people who go the extra mile to say "omg they cut off a whole part of the game to sell it to us separately" are seriously just annoying. I hate any kind of criticism that assumes how the behind the scenes development process works. Believe it or not people, releasing content for your game after its release is just a good idea for keeping a game's longevity, even if it is paid. Game developers surely know it, and create/plan for specific content knowing it won't be released with the main game. That should be common knowledge at this point. It's just a good idea. Don't forget the era where they released slightly better versions of the previous games just with more stuff. THIS IS BETTER. DLCS ARE BETTER.
But then, the price. Sure, whatever, it should've been 60$, but much like Tears of the Kingdom, I got 70$ worth of enjoyment out of it. That's how you bozos judge this stuff right? Putting a monetary value on how much you enjoy something? Well guess what, I'm sure a solid portion of you wouldn't even enjoy it at 60$ because you earnestly think a giant company is going to put out 30$ games in their big-ticket franchises. Yeah, obviously it would slap if they just made their games super cheap, no shit. You're just hopped up on something or other. Yeah obviously indie games can provide tons more enjoyability for way less, how are we still having this conversation? I have 1128 hours in Terraria (and 138 hours in tModLoader) and I got it for like 11 bucks. If you're so indie-pilled, why are you even here? The big cheeses in Nintendo obviously aren't going to listen to you, so you're literally just annoying the people who just want to enjoy the damn game. Anyway here's a great Scott the Woz video (I know it's Scott's Stash don't @ me)
Spoilers
Obviously minor spoilers first. At first I thought it was pretty lame that they skipped you right up to rank F from rank V or whatever, but as I thought about it more, it kind of would've been pretty tedious to just grind through all those ranks just because it's how the alphabet works. If they wanted the game's finale to be at sort of level 60 as usual, then they did kind of have to do it. Again, as I've been saying, if they did create meaningful content for each rank, it would've worked, but I still got enough out of dealing with all the bigger characters that they had for the final few ranks. Really the most annoying part would just be having to get a new Promotion Ticket for each of them, I was already getting a little tired of just trouncing every trainer I saw in the Royale just for that, so having to do it even MORE would just make it more tiring.
As for the whole Rust Syndicate, I at first thought Corbeu was going to almost be like an early game gym leader level since he was one of the only characters revealed early, but nope. He's actually kind of the leader of the "Evil" team of ZA, which I didn't see coming. I honestly thought there were going to be 5 different Syndicates, one for each colored area, and Rust was just going to be one of them, and that was going to be a side part to the main Z-A Royale. I wasn't disappointed though, I honestly think they're the best "Evil" team since Skull and Aether. They have so much overpowering aura, just based on their personalities and sheer OTT-ness of their headquarters. When I had to go in and deal with them I genuinely got an "oh fuck" kind of feeling, which I don't think a single other Team has ever put into me before. That's the power of modern Pokemon being at full-scale. I will say though, I was a bit disappointed that they were actually good people, and just had really intimidating vibes for some reason. For a second I did kind of think we had a true-blue Evil Team again, but alas. I'm still hoping for one of those.
I also love ALL the stuff happening with Grisham and Flare Nouveau (even though, as a team idea it was short lived). I clocked those fuckers as Team Flare people from the get-go but I didn't realize they were actually trying to both revive Team Flare and that they would LEAD US INTO TEAM FLARE HEADQUARTERS? Literally once I fought the girl whose name I forgot and a new Team Flare theme started up I was fucking BEAMING. The Headquarters theme and its matching battle theme both slapped too. I haven't listened to L's battle theme on purpose though. I am glad though that Grisham was just a kid grunt who grew up thinking he needed to be the one to revive Team Flare. Some Leaker said for some reason that he was actually Xerosic, but with an actual skin color and like 200 pounds lighter. It is way more interesting to have a character that once was on the sidelines, but through their own initiative became a distinct character. Again though, could've done with him and the girl staying evil, but I think it was more fitting for them to just be like "fuck it whatever, Team Flare is over. Let's be normal people now." I'll take that ending for them with the Rust Syndicate being more evil, please.
DOUBLE SPOILERS
Holy fucking shit you guys
This was easily the best grand finale in any Pokemon game ever, absolutely 0 competition, which I guess also makes it the coolest sequence in any Pokemon game yet. Say what you want about modern Pokemon, but they clearly know how to do grand finales right now. I loved the Sword and Shield Eternamax fight, and the AI professor fight in SV, and this is like 20x more crazy. Even if you got the impression that this game is a piece of shit, at LEAST watch the whole finale sequence, because it is genuinely that cool. You can tell where the budget went.
As for specifics, LA TOUR EIFFEL IS A FUCKING CANNON. uh oh whoopsie doodle looks like AZ made ANOTHER superweapon of death and didn't tell anyone. Dude really has a knack for that. He must've left on a worldwide journey, came back, and been fucking FLABBERGASTED that they built a whole damn city around his tower. Then when Floette joined with it, and it became a fucking PLANT MONSTER I was just. I can't believe they fused Audrey II with the Eiffel Tower. That is the last damn thing I would've expected.
Just the fact that there seemed to be significant changes to Lumiose as the events were happening, with all the scaffolding being everywhere, was cool enough since you've been in this pretty static place for the whole game. Then you had to team up with all the friends you made along the way, love that. Then you had to Multi Battle against GROUPS OF ROGUE MEGAS? Genuinely, these were some of the hardest fights in the series since so much shit was happening, I was just overwhelmed in a good way. Then dude, when I saw Corbeu in that big open shopping area I was so hyped to battle there, and then it turned out to be a Gardevoir and Gallade, and I was even more into it. That fight almost wiped me out, even though they gave the Gallade Psybeam for some reason. I guess shooting a laser is actually pretty strong in this game even if it's a little weaker.
Then, oh my god, once you team up with Zygarde to fight against Hyperrouge Ange Floette or whatever the hell it was called, I was like "ok attack the flowers" but after a while I remembered THIS WAS A POKEMON GAME. I AM ATTACKING GIANT FLOWERS CREATED BY A POSSESSED EIFFEL TOWER WHILE A MEGAZORD FLIES AROUND SHOOTING AT IT AND PROTECTING ME FROM ITS HELL RAIN. I don't think I was ever this hyped for any video game finale before, which I think was just because I didn't expect THIS much out of it. I think the closest competitor was the finale of Tears of the Kingdom, but it still didn't match the sheer adrenaline running through my veins. Then when I Mega Evolved Zygarde, I got what is probably one of the coolest screenshots I'll ever take on the Switch, which is just the scene of me below the glowing Zygarde in my color-matching MZ attire.
Then of course AZ dies for real, which I was semi-spoiled on since I saw a post that tried to be slick and said like "Story spoilers: AZ's fate, etc etc" and I was like "ok buddy thanks." I was a little disappointed he just kind of conked out and didn't go out in a blaze of glory in the finale, but it was still, like, good? Like it was sad of course but I don't know how else to describe a character's death. Just the fact that he's been in anguish for 3000 years, kind of got back to feeling normal for the last couple years of his life, and then finally passed away, makes it more emotional than anyone else dying. Knowing he had a lot of history behind him made it. Oh and also, I noticed INSTANTLY that his gravestone location was where the mandatory early side quest had us find that one Sableye who stole that one lady's ring. And now as I'm writing this, I just remembered that the lady also mentioned it being the ring of her late husband, which makes it even cooler how much thought they put into that one side quest, forcing us to go there and acknowledge this area and the vibes around it.
You know what was also surprising? QUASARTICO WASN'T EVIL? THEY'RE JUST FUCKING STUPID? They literally did just think it's a good idea to put areas in a giant city where a giant raging hellhound will chase you down and burn you to death if it so much as sees you? I mean I haven't done any postgame stuff yet, and maybe something will happen in the DLC, but that was a reveal just as crazy as the possessed Eiffel Tower. When Jett was first revealed, I was INSTANTLY like "Ok what evil final battle music will she get and what is she actually trying to do with Lumiose." Turns out, exactly what she said she'd do. I feel like since your rival's Missing Persons case wasn't resolved, and that they said the DLC will "continue the story," there's bound to be more. Who knows whether Jett will be evil there though, I honestly don't know.
Anyway, this is why I keep buying Pokemon games. It's because I keep enjoying them. Shocker.
I was originally going to do a whole thing about seeing if every type matchup in Pokemon makes sense, but after watching MandJTV's video on the explanations I realized most do pretty much make sense or feel right in terms of vibes, so I'm just going to put down one idea from that whole thought process that I need to make known
Bug types are getting hoed.
Think about it, what even are Bug types? How the hell does one launch an elemental beam of bug energy? So all we have to consider are the tiny, weak little things we see in real life.
So OF COURSE they'd be weak to Rock, idk if you know this but any living being as small as the average bug can get eviscerated by a rock. But, if there was a bug as big as an average Pokemon, wouldn't that kind of make them more resistant to Rock than anything? They literally have biological armor all over their bodies, that's like the one defining part of a bug aside from caterpillars and stuff. If a bug was blown up to a human size, it would be more resistant to Rocks than a human would.
Same goes for Flying. Flying types are birds, and birds eat bugs, but birds also eat rats. Birds DON'T eat bears, because it's almost like size is the important factor there, so Flying wouldn't be strong against Normal. So why would they be strong against Bug? If a bug were the size of a bear, no bird could do anything to it, and just like with Rocks its exoskeleton would make it even more resistant to Flying than the average type. Even considering the Flying type as "wind," I'd have to guess exoskeletons would make it even heavier than the average animal, so it would be more resistant to that too.
For Fire it's a similar situation. Fire kills a lot of things, but wouldn't an exoskeleton make it even less flammable than the average animal? The only reason why Bugs are weak to Fire is because they're so small just about anything kills them easily. You'd think having hairs would make you more vulnerable to Fire, so Normal types would get screwed.
But if that's the case, why aren't Bugs weak to Water? For animals their size, the surface tension in water would literally trap them inside of it, making them drown. Also, it probably isn't as known in Japan, but the whole nursery rhyme about the itsy bitsy spider getting washed away by the rain?
And why do they even resist Ground? Because there are lots of digging bugs? But don't you know that it's way easier to bury something small, suffocating it? Just because something's good at digging doesn't mean it can magically escape any situation where it's encased in dirt. Unless we're talking about like, worms, which I guess are technically bugs so
Considering the size argument, I don't know why Bug resists Fighting, but at least it would hold true when they're big too.
At least the things Bug is good against make enough sense. They're strong against Grass because, even at their small individual size, swarms can be absolutely devastating for crops. Dark makes sense because of lightning bugs/fireflies, but also I guess like Kamen Rider defeating evil or whatever. And Psychic types because of the whole fear thing. I also don't think there's any other type that necessarily should be weak to Bug, except maybe Fairy could at least have some case for it, but that case is basically just because Fairies tend to be small, meaning they have to contend with Bugs at a more evenly-met size, but that basically would nullify the rest of what I'm saying and it can still make sense then since Fairies tend to have the intelligence to tame Bugs even at that size, so whatever.
It's time to pull out my Ideas Guy cap and describe what I think is the ideal Social Media site, because as an artist that posts online, that's obviously something I think about a ton. Also, because of that, all of these thoughts are going to be optimized for artists in mind more or less. Also also, all of these things are going to be things that sites have already done, just not all at once, or in their current state.
Post Types
This is the one thing I want the most. When you're posting something, I want you to be able to mark what type of post it's supposed to be. For example:
Text - With subtypes ETC (random thoughts), longer Ramblings, News, or actual Writing.
Images - Photos, Memes, or Art
Videos - Recordings (or whatever you'd call random IRL camera recordings), Edited (or however you describe more polished content like most Youtube videos), or Animation
Audio - Recordings or Music
The main draw of this being that it makes it way easier to both find and block exactly what you want. For example, I only want to see art made by people, so I'll mark it so I only want to see Writing, Art, Animation, and Music, and fully block ETC text or Recordings. You have no idea how annoying it is to follow an artist, but then get bombarded with them ranting about nothing (and not the kind of nothing that's at least fun to engage with, legit nonsense) or them flooding your feed/their page with memes/reaction images.
Although, obviously some posts could qualify for multiple tags, so any number of the subsections could be marked. But, you could also have different limits for what you see, like marking it so you want to see EVERYTHING marked with a certain subsection, or just being okay with seeing it if one of its other subtypes is something you want to see, or making it so you never see ANYTHING with that mark. Obviously not everyone's going to mark their post type perfectly, but I think since that will more often make it harder for people who WANT to see a post of that type, as opposed to annoying people who don't want to see those types. Each post would probably default to the ETC/Photo/Recording type since the most casual users who wouldn't engage with this feature would most likely be posting that type of content, while artists who really want people to see their stuff would go out of their way to mark it as Art.
There could also be a sort of "effort level" mark, like Casual, Mild, or High effort. Again, posts would default to Casual effort, so people who do post random junk wouldn't have to mess with this feature and could just dump their thoughts. Meanwhile, if an artist put a ton of effort into something and wants that to be acknowledged, they could just mark it as such. Obviously this can be used to filter out low-effort content, but it can also be useful if you just feel like browsing through really cool and detailed art. Each of these markers could be browsed like any other tag, aside from being used for personal filters. And of course, this is on top of normal tags like most sites use.
Ideally you can also create groups of settings like Bluesky, where you can swap between whole groups of followings with each filter for each artist in the group already set, so you can just swap to and from it as you feel like. Then, you could also share those groups of filters, so other people could just add it to their groups.
Honestly, any site that uses a feature like this would make me want to at least try it. The main thing that makes me want to use a site is that it's both great for casual use AND for art. Like on Twitter, I like posting there because I can just drop a random thought, a sketch, and a fully complete piece of art, while sites like Artstation or Newgrounds feel like they only really work for more finished art, and I can't dump my more casual things there. But, of course, I very frequently just want to go into an artist's Twitter profile and just turn off all Text they post because they can get super annoying about all that, despite the fact that I still want to see all the art they post. I already made sure to turn off all Retweets for every artist I follow, since a lot of them either retweet art I don't want to see, or retweet some other random junk I EXTRA don't want to see (especially on Twitter).
Trending/Algorithm/Following tabs
Similar to above, I do actually want to know what people are talking about on the site, and I do want stuff that algorithmically might be something I like. I want a full Trending, Algorithm, and Following tab. The first completely ignores all you-specific factors and just shows what people in general are liking, the second shows you posts with similar content to what you've shown to like, and the last is just a purely controlled feed of exactly what you choose to see and nothing else.
Obviously algorithms get a lot of flack from being shit, but in an ideal world they would actually be great for easily finding new stuff. Considering you could also easily search by post type, meaning it would still be easy to find art regardless of the algorithm. Maybe you could even sort your searches/algorithm to favor/disfavor attention, so you could specifically search for posts with very little attention on them.
Retweets/Sharing
Pretty self explanatory, but considering sites like Instagram don't really have a straightforward "Share button" (I know you can share posts to your Story or whatever but it is way less intuitive and useful than a plain Retweet-type button) I really want to make sure my ideal site has one. Obviously it would be a thing you can disable for people you're following, and those shares would be sorted into a different section than normal posts, but I do really want it.
Post Folders
Also pretty self explanatory. I just want to be able to sort all posts into folders, regardless of what type they are. Obviously, if you've just found someone you want to follow, you want to see their best stuff without having to wade through the rest of the junk (like I do on Youtube when I sort a channel's uploads by Popular), so if they made a folder to sort their best art then that would be perfect. But, I would also want to sort all art of a character into a single folder, which is also nice for when you really like a character and want to see every piece of art of them. There's really no reason not to have this.
Groups
A couple of sites have this, which made me realize how perfect it is. Deviantart, Pillowfort, Tumblr (it's new), Reddit, and I guess Discord also counts, all have something like this, but I feel like there's always something missing.
Deviantart is obviously solely art-focused so it doesn't have any room for random text posts, and it is super annoying when a group's manager doesn't upkeep their folders, since they can be filled up, meaning you sometimes just can't submit your art to the group (At least, in the right folder.)
Pillowfort is close, but it feels almost too plain. Maybe that's just because the site isn't that popular.
Tumblr's new-ish Communities feature is decent, but it seems hard to search through older content, and there's no sorting.
Reddit entirely hinges upon Subreddits so the fact that you can't really just post something to yourself and expect it to go anywhere (I know there are followers and user-based posts or however you'd say, but come on, Reddit is for Subreddits). Also, even though you can cross-post to other subreddits, it makes it too obvious that it's just taken from another community instead of being a standalone post that is shared to multiple places.
Discord servers can definitely be pretty extensive, and since they're so insulated there's really nothing weird about sharing a piece of art to multiple servers, but it's still nicer to have a feed that you can share to other communities.
Basically, my ideal would just be a group that you can follow and filter like a profile, and people can join it. I guess since I already added so many new ways to filter and sort profiles that's all I really need to say lol, it's just nice having spaces devoted to a fandom/franchise for people to share stuff in. It would be nice to have some way to ensure that there's at least one "big" group for people to join, since a lot of places that let anyone make a group also have tons of functionally identical groups, sometimes making it hard to know which one is the biggest/most active. Maybe there could be a function to request a sort of "merge" between two groups, which would just combine all posts shared to each one, so nothing gets lost. That would also have to include a poll for all followers to vote in though, since I'm sure there would be a lot of group politics, like the bigger group having more assholish mods or rules that some people might not want to deal with.
Custom Emoji
Discord has sold me on this completely. I LOVE just being able to upload an image, and then being able to use that as an emoji. Not only is it fun to just make your own (join my Discord server to see the ones I've made) but it's way more fun to use those made by other people too. The default emoji have their place, but hand-made emoji specific to individual creators or franchises are WAY more usable in most cases, inside or outside a fandom. Twitch also inadvertently can show how great this can be, both with their in-built subscriber emotes, but also more public sites like BetterTTV letting anyone add any emotes from a public list to their channel.
Like Discord, you'd get access to the custom emoji by joining a group or following a creator. By default they could only be used within the spaces that made them, and an emoji could only be spread around for public use after a more rigorous verification process, since stuff like that could get really out of hand if left unchecked. And, of course, individual groups and creators could make it so no one can use public emotes in their space if they don't want it.
Multiple accounts under the same login
Pretty self explanatory. As someone who has both a SFW main account and a NSFW account, I definitely want account switching to at least be convenient, since sites like Bluesky have it but it's pushed underneath the Settings menu so it's way less convenient than like Twitter. But, I actually don't want something like Tumblr, where all your blogs are under one account and you just post under your account, and choose which blog to post it to on a post-by-post basis. That has made me accidentally post something to the wrong blog multiple times. I need the barrier of switching accounts to make sure things don't go awry (especially when it comes to NSFW art).
BUT I do like the idea of having multiple accounts under a single login, so you don't have to make up a whole new email and password just to get a new one. I don't know if that's a security risk, so maybe you could optionally add a PIN or something to an individual profile so you have to enter it to access it.
Opt-in Rating/Qualified rating
I love Newgrounds for the sheer variety of art that's on there, from basic art to full shows to full games. But, the one big thing I hate about it is the rating system. People, as a whole, are so stupid about it that it becomes completely useless, and downright annoying. I already wrote a whole thing about that. Basically, it's useless because it devolves into a basic "Like" and "Dislike" rating system, since if people just like something, they rate it 5 stars, and if they don't like it, they rate it 0 stars. Then, any rating in between that gets lost in the mix. Not to mention that people might say "oh but it's constructive criticism" even though it literally isn't, since a mid-to-0 rating is completely useless as criticism unless the person actually writes something alongside their rating, which few ever do. But, apart from that, some people might actually want something more than a basic "like" number, both in terms of knowing whether their art is actually good or knowing if something made by someone else is actually good.
So, what I'd want is an opt-in rating system. For one, it's the same style, where you can just rate 1-5 stars with halves too, but you choose whether you want it on a post-by-post basis. Also, there would be a smaller set of verified users who vow to actually give legitimate criticism to work, and posters can choose to either have the rating open to the general public, or just those verified users (where the rating is still visible to the public, maybe the written criticism is too). That way people just posting casually can just do that, and people who want to grow as an artist can get that help too.
Although of course, a basic "like" would still be available.
NSFW tagging
Obviously I need the ability to post NSFW content at all, but we do need something akin to what Newgrounds has where it's not just an either-or "It's NSFW or SFW," and instead have a more gradient like system where you can mark whether it's NSFW because it's porn, NSFW because it's violent/gory, or maybe just mildly NSFW because of some slight or artistic nudity. Profiles should be forced to show what type of content they generally produce though, from "Exclusively NSFW content" to "Partially NSFW content" to "Exclusively SFW content" so people know exactly what they're signing up for.
This also goes for a more generalized sensitive tag system, both for marking more out-there fetishy content and sensitive topics mentioned in text form. I think Mastodon has that, where the image is blurred and shows what sensitive tags were placed on it above the "show content" option.
Customization
Obviously customization is nice. Even though it always sucks when a site takes it away, I don't need a full on HTML editor to be satisfied (especially since I don't know HTML). I do like Tumblr's level of customization, which does have HTML editing, but also a lot of options for people who don't know that stuff. Personally, I think my Tumblr blog looks pretty great, and I can't really think of much more that I'd want than what's there. However, I also like Deviantart's current way of doing it, since there are various nodes with a set purpose that you can edit and rearrange, also including HTML editing and background editing for Core users. There are a lot of possibilities, but since it's so obviously nice to have I'll just say I want more useful site functions first before I care about the pretty stuff.
That's basically it. The unfortunate reality of social media is that the hardest part is just convincing people that forgetting about all the stuff they've posted elsewhere and that committing to a whole new place is worth their time at all. Especially when it comes to a site like my hypothetical here, where there's so much stuff to contend with that it would probably be hard to convince people to deal with its BS. Also, much like a multiplayer game, it doesn't matter how mechanically perfect a new site is unless there are people on it. The reason why hellsites like Twitter probably won't ever die is just because so many people are already on there, and people are used to it.
All I need to do is design a cute girl mascot for this site who's so cute and maybe a bit hot that every artist will want to draw her and give me free publicity.
So way back in the day I somehow managed to leave my Pokemon Platinum cartridge out in our Florida yard for years and years, only to dig it up and try to clean it off and get some more use out of it. It was kind of on and off for a bit, but it recently went from "damaged" to "hopeless," so I tried tons of stuff to try and super-clean it to get it to work, but to no avail. According to a guy on Reddit, you can switch out the actual chip inside the cartridge with all the data and transfer it to a cleaner motherboard with normal pins, as long as the motherboard style matched (since there are like a dozen different styles over the years), denoted by the last 5 digits in the code that's above the connection pins on the cartridge (Platinum's is Y10-01). So, I looked through my collection of DS games, and turned out the only one that matched was Pokemon Ranger: Guardian Signs, so I thought "Hey, I guess I should do a farewell playthrough of the game before I harvest its insides for parts, since I can't earnestly remember completing it or even really playing it much at all."
And that ended up being a 100% playthrough, and since I've always been thinking about playing the Ranger games again I basically have to talk about it.
So since one of my "things" as a kid was Pokemon, we basically bought every Pokemon-related game around the GBA/DS era (even Dash) as it came out, which means I have all 3 Ranger games just burning a hole in my DS game case. I think I played the original the most, and probably some of Shadows of Almia, but I genuinely don't think I beat any of them. I definitely remember the original being too hard, which I'll have to see if it's actually still true. But, since Guardian Signs is the one marked for death, it needed to be the one I play first. I at least knew what to expect, so I just booted it up and went for it. And I'm obviously not going to give you a play-by-play in text form, but I gotta say…
There is so much fucking YAPPING. I legit thought SM/USUM were the worst Pokemon games for "Stop, let me talk to you for a second" but hooolyyyy. And it's even worse, because I kind of like Gen 7's story overall even though most of the dialogue is just workable. But this game takes it to another level of "oh my god literally no one cares, shut up." If you did a drinking game where you took a shot every time any random character said "at any rate…" or "in other words…" you would die half way through. Every character basically says the exact piece of dialogue you'd imagine they'd say in their situation, but played out like it's the most remarkable dialogue you've ever heard, with no good way to skip through it, not even "fast text" options. The worst contender was easily in one of the sky-chase scenes where there was the trio of Pincher girls, where one couldn't speak up, another abbreviated things, and the third just couldn't stand the other two's speech patterns. They go on and on doing their comedy routine multiple times, then you avoid their basic attacks and beat up their horde of mons and that's it, nothing to come from any of that. Nick, as a character, was also a whole "spam A" type of character, but at least he like, existed within the story as a being who did things. Screw Ben (I played as Summer ofc) though. What's the point of having a silent protagonist if you're going to have some schmuck by your side 24/7 who does all the yapping for you?
And one thing I noticed is that they physically cannot explain the in-universe reason how capturing works succinctly. Every time they had to bring it up they had to be like "Did you convey your feelings of friendship to the wild Pokemon via your Capture Styler?" instead of just like "Did you capture the Pokemon?" It's like they were afraid to even suggest that this was at all similar to normal Pokeball capture, or even suggest that it was at all dangerous. Like, they needed to make ABSOLUTELY SURE every parent hovering over their kid's shoulder reading every bit of dialogue to make sure it's the most acceptable it could ever be KNEW that the Ranger was objectively a good person, mechanically speaking.
Anyway whatever, the weird thing is that the actual event-writing in the game was decent enough, it was just when a character had to open their mouths that it got aggravating. I feel like the whole Societea bit came out of nowhere but at least the characters existed beforehand, and mostly had fun boss fights. Honestly since the main antagonists were called "The Pokemon Pinchers" I basically just turned my brain off from the story minute 1, I expected nothing out of it. It's all just setpiece in the name of gameplay.
And also the graphics, my god it's the kind of game to make you realize that the main series Gen 4 games (despite being peak) actually look kinda ass compared to a "pretty" DS game. Every single Pokemon was so animated, even aside from looking really good just as a still sprite. You'd think it's because the Pokemon in this game are more limited, but really, they do SO much more than any mon in a main-series 2D Pokemon game, even compared to Gen 5's animations. So many of them had unique poses/animations for certain types of attacks, like slashes or shooting, and the Pokemon you find while flying have a whole different sprite for when you see them in that stage VS in battle. Even the people felt so appealing, with them getting so much personality and detail in the deceptively low pixel counts, especially when it came to their animations/poses (I mean my god they gave Blue Eyes the most jiggle physics that have ever existed in any Pokemon game). AND they even had actual cinematic shots. It's crazy how much artistic effort went into this series of games only for there to be 3 games total.
I can at least say that these games were basically freebies for a young adult such as myself. There wasn't a single fight or challenge in the entire process of 100%ing that I came close to losing. The only fights I took a decent amount of damage in were fights like with Latias where she put up the shot-barrier around herself and sped around at high speeds, also with that being in the sky so I had no partner Pokemon to blast her. Even both Mewtwo and Lugia fights were pretty simple, literally all you have to do is be patient and primarily do damage with partner Pokemon when you can. That, and some of the various field dangers. But, even then, I still actually enjoyed playing the game. I only 100%ed the game because I wanted to fight Lugia, even though I expected more of a challenge for a more secret-bossy type of boss like that (I no-hit it). Also, the overworld puzzles were basically nonexistant, since the mons you needed to progress through the story were always just off to the side in the area of the puzzle. Even when it came to the few blockades or static mons that required some special field move not in the area, it was more just annoying to go to some other place on the map to catch the mon that you need. I really got my fill of that avalanche section on Mt. Sorbet. Sucks too, because I loved having multiple Empoleon on my squad and I had to plow through that whole section to get more of them. It also sucks how there's a whole multiplayer portion of the game that's now kind of useless despite seeming like a cool idea in principle.
Although, all of that really makes me long for a modern addition to the Ranger formula. I looked up opinions on the series and which one was the overall favorite, and even though it's definitely a mixed bag of opinions it seems like Shadows of Almia is the overall favorite, but most people see how Guardian Signs is the most polished mechanically. So, since even that is still so behind the times and not really that interesting in terms of having satisfying exploration, I can't imagine how crazy a truly open world modern Ranger game would go. Before the Switch 2 I imagined a worst-but-interesting case scenario where they'd force you to use motion controls like an actual real-life Capture Styler to play, but now with mouse controls it's just so obvious that it would use that instead. I also feel like the Legends formula of gameplay of you actually having to dodge Pokemon attacks yourself is already super close to how a modern Rangers game would be. I could probably write a whole treatment for a modern Rangers game, but I feel like it's so obvious how everything would work that it would be kind of pointless. They've already crossed half the hurdles they'd need to in main games, they just need to call it "Rangers" and make you capture mons differently. All I ask is that, no matter what, there NEEDS to be a cameo of Ukulele Pichu. Truly the most GOATed singular Pokemon-character in the entire franchise.
All of that also made me realize how the concept of Pokemon Rangers in-universe might be my favorite like, I don't know, Pokemon Profession? It's not even an extensive list, but conceptually I honestly like it so much more than the concept of a Pokemon Trainer. It somehow feels so much more natural with the central MO of the Pokemon world, where Pokemon are both dangerous while also being friends. And, they even help facilitate the relationship between People and Pokemon so much more than Trainers, partially just because you can't look past the concept of Trainers collecting mons like objects and making them fight for pleasure. Sure, they SAY they enjoy it, but surely not all of them want to fight, right? Meanwhile, Rangers basically exist to make sure Pokemon are safe in their environments, make sure people are safe around Pokemon, and while doing all of that they don't even keep a permanent team. They send off their partners back into the wild once they've done their job, aside from special partners. It actually made me realize that, if they ever make a new Ranger game, they NEED to make N cameo as a Ranger. He literally did exactly that in game: he caught Pokemon from the surrounding environment, did one fight with them, then released them. Plus, he's clearly more deeply attached to Pokemon on a natural level than the average person. He's so Ranger-coded.
I got sidetracked. Even aside from all that, the vibes of all Rangers is just so immaculate. Imagine being a child lost on a mountain, scared for your life, killer rock types all around you, and all of a sudden this badass young person bursts out of nowhere, reassures you everything's going to be alright, and effortlessly fights off every danger in their way to get you back to safety. That's the type of life experience that would permanently alter your brain chemistry and make a child devote their life to becoming a Ranger themselves. Hell, it doesn't even have to be that dire. What if you just like, lost your Pokemon, and a Ranger took the time out of their busy patrolling just to bring them back to you? I don't think it's fathomable to imagine a more respectable, likable type of person in the entire Pokemon universe. It's such a cool type of person.
It of course makes me think back to one of the Top 2 of Pokemon Movies (matched with Rise of Darkrai), Temple of the Sea. Jackie's backstory of him getting trapped in a snowy mountain, and only surviving thanks to the kindness of Pokemon, and that one experience being the thing to make him want to be a Ranger is one one of the moments in all of media that gets me a bit emotional. Even if it's just because I watched the movie at peak emotional-development time, it's still the truth. Something about the juxtaposition of extreme danger/emotional lows and a good ending is what really gets me. I mean, even Ash is like what I mentioned before, where he gets first hand Ranger experience and instantly wants to become one. Frankly, he's pretty Ranger-coded too. If he's already a Pokemon Master, why not shift goals? He even has the electric companion who never goes into their Pokeball. It's perfect.
Anyway, that last bit was the only bit worth saying. Now that my Guardian Signs game is fully complete (aside from the multiplayer content, which I hear is borderline impossible alone), I can break open its carapace and extract its meaty insides, swap its brains out with a game I still like more than it, and leave my Ranger's consciousness stuck in a purgatory where it can never be accessed again. Fun. Now I have to give the other Ranger games a shot. I started a save on the original Rangers, but I am already feeling the slog and lack of polish, so I have no idea how long that will last lol
I found r/PokemonHallofFame and posted my big list of teams I have listed on Showdown there, so I might as well post it here too, since there's really no reason not to
I also transfer all these teams up so I can keep them in Home too, this is just more practical if I just feel like looking at them.
Also these are only my more modern teams, I don't remember what my truly first teams were prior to Ultra Moon (maybe Moon). My oldest team marked here is either my Platinum or Pearl team, idk which.
My Platinum No Evolution team is currently trapped in my broken Platinum cartridge. More info on that here
The Masquerain on my Moon team is actually shiny. I encountered a full-odds Shiny Surskit while going through Brooklet Hill
For the default White 2 team, I didn't actually keep them so I don't remember what I had, all I remember is that I intentionally went for an Electivire.
For the Infinite Fusion teams, they're a Whimsinape, Haxevoir, Iron Gel (a custom sprite I made, it's a Metagross/Reuniclus), Sablix, Mismageon, and Palkwile, while the Mono-Steel one is Jiraluna, Necroslash, Gyarasharp, Haxklang, Banzor, and Metamise. I posted those earlier on this blog
I just realized I didn't put my Renegade Platinum team in there. It's an Aggron, Gallade, Weavile, Drifblim, Milotic, and Electivire
Hottest Pokemon take that I just got but am slowly becoming more and more into
If we're bound to get another 1000+ Pokemon in time (cuz why would they ever stop) I'd rather new mons "not look like Pokemon" because shit's going to get real repetitive if they keep using the same design rules for the rest of time
That ALSO being said, I am even more set on my take that Gamefreak/Creatures/TPC/whoever DECIDES what looks like a Pokemon, thereby legally meaning all official Pokemon do look like Pokemon because they are, you know, actual fucking Pokemon. Everyone using "They don't look like Pokemon" as a criticism just don't feel comfortable just saying "I don't like how they look" because of their need for pseudo-intellectualism but I'll need to save that for another day or else I'll go off
Splicing together the best parts of various Pokemon games
Every once in a while I realize that, if you took the best aspect of certain other Pokemon games and smushed them all together into one single game, you would already have a borderline perfect Pokemon game. So like, let's do that, I guess
Here's a jist if you don't care about reading the entire thing:
For graphics:
The Trainers in Masters EX
The Pokemon in Unite
The environmental behavior of New Snap
The towns/cities of Sword and Shield
The character customization of Sword and Shield
The natural environments of Let's Go/The 3DS games
The gameplay of Scarlet and Violet, with some tweaks
The story of Gen 5, more or less
None for the character/Pokemon designs, since they each have ups and downs
I also made a slightly-longer-but-still-short thread on Twitter if you want that: https://x.com/robert00poole/status/1938328001206177908
Now on to the full explanations:
With the unforgivably ugly Scarlet and Violet fresh in my mind I always think about which existing games have the best graphics in each department. Here's what I think could make the prettiest game:
The Trainers of Masters EX. The one thing I always think about Scarlet and Violet is that, even though the environments and all that were seriously underbaked (a term I usually cringe at others using, but I think it really just objectively applies in this case), the humans still looked terrible despite having fully realized textures and details and whatnot, meaning there was really no hope for them. They were making the classic mistake of trying to turn anime characters semi-realistic, even though no other part of this entire franchise ever leant itself to even a remotely realistic vibe. Pokemon are inherently stylized creatures, and the humans need to reflect this. And, for me, I honestly think they perfected the Pokehuman visuals in Masters EX. Getting years of the most perfectly realized versions of every major trainer across the franchise has really proved that the art team of Masters knows what they're doing. They even managed to remind me that I do, in fact, like the human designs of Scarlet and Violet, they are just all ruined by the terrible graphical design choices of the game. Characters that look like this do NOT need every fold of their clothes or every strand of their hair textured. But, even Masters lets some design details like those through if it can make a model look better. And that's not even considering the fact that each trainer gets a ton of different themed outfits and even theme songs over time, some of which are the most amazing I've seen in the entire franchise. All the fanart is highly deserved. But, I guess the worst thing is that all the haters who are still coping over having infinitely less fullfilling experiences on their PS5s will have a field day saying it has "mobile game graphics," even though, surprisingly, mobile games can actually look good if they give a shit about looking good.
(image courtesy of @ElChicoEevee on Twitter, and the Masters model even looks better than that in game)
The Pokemon of Unite. Like with the trainers, the Pokemon themselves do still need to stay as stylized as possible. They don't need fur textures to convey what they are. What they need is bright colors, something obviously missing from Scarlet and Violet specifically. But, Unite has some of the most saturated Pokemon in the franchise somehow, which I think looks great. I guess their shading could be a bit flatter (my second choice for this would honestly be Sword and Shield, which are less saturated but I think did get the shading and outlines perfect) but after so many less-than-saturated games I really have to appreciate how colorful everything is. The one thing I'm torn on is whether I want metallic Pokemon to actually have a metallic shine, because I genuinely think super busy designs like Miraidon look better with less shine since the highlights further complicate its already complicated design, but then Pokemon like Metagross, Magnezone, or Duraludon benefit from the metallic-ness so much more. It'll always depend. I guess the one reason why Unite is here instead of Masters EX, despite Masters also following a lot of these ideas, is just that Masters is clearly using the same models and animations we've gotten used to since XY, while Unite is clearly at the very least animating them in new and interesting ways, since they have to do less of them overall. I have no idea if they are different models entirely, but they feel different because they act differently. And, of course, they also get outfits, which definitely tend to look more goofy on average compared to the trainer outfits of Masters, but I don't think a single Pokemon fan would be mad if they let us give our Pokemon outfits in the main games.
The Behavior of New Snap? If for some reason The Pokemon Company REALLY wanted the Pokemon world to look semi-realistic, then I would be okay with the entire franchise looking like New Snap, even though I definitely prefer the stylization of the aforementioned games. But, the one thing that New Snap does amazingly is giving each Pokemon really fun and interesting environmental behaviors. Obviously, this is because you're literally on a rail going through a premade location with the actions and locations of each Pokemon predetermined, unlike the main games where Pokemon have to appear in tons of different locations at random, but still, you can't deny if they could somehow manage to get certain Pokemon to act and respond to the environment like they do in New Snap that it would go crazy. (but for the love of god please NEVER take the humans from this game, I have never seen such wooden, unappealing animations in my life. Not to mention their designs are also the most bog-standard Pokehuman designs out there)
The town/city graphics of Sword and Shield. I do feel like even though Gamefreak tends to not quite get natural environments as right in the modern day, I do think their artificial environment game is actually pretty good. The lighting in Scarlet and Violet doesn't do its towns any favors, but they at least look relatively fine. But, one of my Pokemon Hot Takes (TM) is that Sword and Shield is the best looking Pokemon game overall (and if you're partial to the 2D games, just say it's the best looking 3D game), and I really think a lot of that is the fact that the towns in the game actually look really good. They feel like they make sense for their size, despite still obviously being RPG-sized towns. I guess I could go through each of the best ones, but really that's pretty much it. I will at least say that, in terms of the games at least, I think Circhester is easily my favorite town in the entire franchise (although Alamos town from Rise of Darkrai still might be my top pick from all Pokemon media). Whenever I don't plan on coming back to the game for a while, I save in front of the fountain at Circhester so I come back to a nice sight. I am curious to see all of Legends ZA since it takes place entirely within a city, and I think it already looks really good because of that.
The character customization of Sword and Shield. Scarlet and Violet shot its character customization in the foot by having the player character attend school, meaning that like 70% of all customization was thrown out the window in favor of school uniforms. I get that it's a Japanese company and uniforms are basically the default there, but I don't care. I want different clothes. Anyway that doesn't really have anything to do with Sword and Shield's customization, I just needed to say it. I think just by virtue of Sword and Shield looking good that its customization looked good too, but I might as well point it out anyway. My all-time favorite player character design though is from Sword and Shield though, which is probably just a virtue of it happening to have a good choice of purple clothing and other good cute-girl options. Although, let's be real, there won't be a truly satisfying character customization until they actually give us different body types. Believe it or not, not everyone playing is a skinny child.
The environment graphics of Lets Go or Sun and Moon. It's kind of hard to pick because there hasn't been one super standout environment, but I do like Let's Go's kind of flashy-stylization thing, even though it might not mesh as well with the other graphics I put here. Sun and Moon also works, but obviously since it's a 3DS game it does feel smaller than it could if it was scaled up to a more normal-game size. There's nothing really wrong with X and Y either, and ORAS also looks great here… Really, you just get the idea. Nothing is quite perfect, but if you scaled up the 3DS vibes and tweaked it to fit the rest of this stuff, it would surely work.
But outside of the graphics, here's every other aspect:
The Gameplay of Scarlet and Violet with a touch of Legends. Since we're out of the graphics section I have to give credit where it's due, I genuinely think every future Pokemon game needs to take from SV's overall gameplay style. Even though it's been memed that "every game needs to be open world," I genuinely think the fundamental ideas of Pokemon are designed for an open world format. You're out on your own adventure, and you want to do whatever you want and find whatever you want at your own pace. And, separating "HMs", Gyms, and the Evil Team into their own sort of progression story is a great idea honestly. What I do think would need to be changed in that regard is to make it so levels advance depending on what you've done, so you can't go through the entire game, then realize you forgot the gym in Cortondo, and then just absolutely trounce them because you just missed it. That was only slightly how things happened with me, I did assume the Artazon gym was first since it was the first one they showed in all the trailers, but still, levels in Pokemon are the one thing that determines difficulty so if you accidentally progress beyond a certain point, anything below your level will just be a footnote in your adventure. Still though, I think that format of play is a good idea.
The one big thing I think needed to be added to SV was the ability to quickly and easily catch things in the overworld, like in the Legends games (and Cobblemon, which is an inherently amazing Pokemon game in itself tbh). Once that feature was given to me, I genuinely can't live without it, it's so nice (even though you rarely successfully catch anything above the basic Route 1 mons). If I had to theorycraft, though, I'd guess they didn't have it here since they were developing it and Arceus side-by-side, and they probably weren't 100% sure if the fans would respond well to this mechanic, so they didn't put it in. I do hope all future main games have it though.
Some other little changes I think should be to the sandwiches and breeding. Aside from the eating animation being laughably bad (another cringy way of saying it that I genuinely believe this time) I think the main reason why I never wanted to use this mechanic is because of how disperate all the different effects were, and how hard it was to remember what place sold what effects or what ingredients made what affects. I'm sure there would be situations where I would want to use all of them, but since I literally had to pull up a wiki to get anything right, I just didn't bother. A lot of the traits they affect are super specific too, like why would I specifically want to increase the size of only Psychic types, etc? Those kinds of mechanics really just bloated all the different foods you could buy throughout the game. They should just be "All Pokemon get bigger/smaller" considering the effect is just cosmetic anyway. Then, for the more important stuff, the types of foods that affect what types at whatever levels should be EXTREMELY obvious. It genuinely felt that every food stand everywhere in the world sold a completely random assortment of stuff that had no bearing on the environment, type of food, or whatever, which made it really annoying to find anything I wanted. You'd think "Okay, I want to get some things to buff the Ice types I find. I should go to an ice cream stand, right?" Nope, the ice cream stand has a ton of different effects, and maybe just like one of them just happens to be related to ice types. Why? Ice cream stands should buff ice types, clearly labeled spicy food restaurants should buff fire types, maybe like a candy store could buff electric types, bakeries for fairy types, etc. Then, for the cities with gyms, they should obviously have type-themed restaurants based after their gyms, since such a thing would be super easy to remember. And then, maybe each store could level up the more you buy from them, so you can actually get decent effects just from buying food. Same goes for ingredients, even if they are type-themed it really didn't feel like it when I was using them.
Okay I guess I had a lot more to say about sandwiches than I thought, but needless to say I want something like that, but just made much more obvious and streamlined lol
But for breeding, the one thing I do like is how you can accumulate a ton of eggs and grab them all at once, instead of just having to get one at a time. If you just put that into the old Daycare format, breeding would be golden. I just don't like how you have to create such a specific situation in your campsite and then wait there and only there. The best situation would be to put multiple sets of parents into a daycare, and then just be able to do a bunch of other stuff around the world while they accumulate eggs, and then you can grab them all at once (although ideally from different daycare workers so you know which batch is which).
Then, one last little thing: I think there really needs to be some special effect to how Pokemon spawn in the overworld. The one problem I had with that is that they always just popped in out of nowhere, and it looked super lame. Even the most basic cloud of smoke + poof sound effect would have been so much better. I don't need ultra-realistic methods of how each Pokemon could be there, I just want something to mask the gamey-ness of how they appear.
This is a lot of complaining in what's supposed to be SV's best category, but this is all to say that every gameplay part that isn't the little changes I complained about is perfect to me. I'm probably forgetting something though.
I guess it is related, but I do think that Tera Raids are legitimately the worst, least functional mini-game-thing in the entire franchise. They touted it like it was ZA's battle system, being a live battle and all that, but it is genuinely the least satisfying type of Pokemon battle I've ever had to deal with. So much stuff happens completely out of view of you, and I feel like the lag of everything genuinely makes things harder because the timer doesn't seem to stop while things lag or animations play. Not to mention there's really only one optimal way to defeat everything at higher levels, which just makes it strategically boring. I can imagine the ZA version of that though, where you and 3 others are actually all running around the field while the strong Tera mon is shooting giant attacks at various people, where you could actually block attacks for your teammates, etc. That sounds awesome. The concept of multi-battling some strong Pokemon is great, but I don't think they've quite gotten it yet.
That also makes me think of what kind of gimmick would be best. In terms of how it's used in gameplay, I think Terastallization is the most interesting, since how it's used and set up on your team legitimately can turn the tide of the battle, especially since any Pokemon can have any Tera type. However, the one big downside of Tera that obviously wouldn't matter to a certain type of person is the severe lack of forms/visuals it gives to some Pokemon. I think the reason so many people (myself included) love Megas so much is because they completely advanced the idea of certain Pokemon, giving people who loved that Pokemon something brand new, and it gave all the other Pokemon interesting future potential. However, only Ogrepon and Terapagos even change at all when they Tera, and honestly I've only seen anyone bother to use Ogrepon's special Tera mechanic at all. I can't even tell you what Terapagos' mechanic is at this moment. How cool would it be for a mon like Glimmora to have a special Tera form, since it is clearly said to have a special connection to Tera crystals, and since that's the champion's ace. Then, of course, key mons like Koraidon and Miraidon should get one too. I don't even really care if they get new abilities or Tera moves or whatever when doing it (even though they should), I just want some new cool look for them. I still personally like Megas the most overall, though. Z-moves are cool but most of the time you don't need them to do massive damage. Dynamax has an insanely cool vibe to it, but doesn't do all that much mechanically, and the Gigantamax forms look cool but also aren't even that different from their base Dynamax forms.
Then of course this is the part where I remark on how the heck we still don't have any difficulty options in any reasonable form. The whole Key-based difficulty options of B2W2 is so mind-bogglingly dumb, I feel like they intentionally made it that dumb so they could sabotage the whole idea of it with the fans so they can be like "well the fans didn't like it when we did it last time, so we won't do it again" or whatever. But, in practice, the Challenge mode there is actually exactly what you would want in a higher difficulty option. Everything's just higher level, and important teams like Gym Leaders/later Rivals/Elite 4/Champion just having better movesets and useful items is all you need to make the game the perfect amount of challenge for someone like me. That is to say, I think the concept of level caps that fans seem to want to put on all their fan projects is actually wretched to me and I hate it. I do want to be able to use one set team of not-the-best mons to get through the game, but I don't want to just trounce everything in my path anyway. I will at least give credit to BDSP here, that game's Elite 4 and Champion were great, and the rematches of all the gym leaders were great too for that reason. That being said, I did take a pretty ass team that included both a Lopunny and an Ambipom because I expected to trounce the game.
That ALSO being said, I do think the most interesting thing you can do difficulty wise in Pokemon games is to just use mons you've never used before, or limit yourself in some way, and not just in terms of Nuzlockes. When replaying a game, I always set up what I want to use in advance so I can intentionally use out-there or weaker mons that I might've never thought to use. Or, I will put some sort of qualifier on the mons, like forcing myself to use only single-stage or two-stage mons, or even playing through with only the first stage of evolution chains, which is definitely the best difficulty spike out of all of them. That one also lets me use mons like Popplio, which I love but also love the evolutions a lot less (I don't hate them, I just don't love them), so even if a game is super easy if you use all the best mons there's still lots of ways to make the game fun-difficult without difficulty options. I'm going to replay all of SV once I get my Switch 2 for obvious reasons, so I'll need an interesting team there (I'm planning on using Crabominable in it for once since it's impossible to get it pre-E4 in Sun and Moon), but I did also formulate new teams for each DLC which made them much more interesting and difficult too. This has all kinda gotten off track so let's go back to the actual reason I'm writing all this.
Black and White/B2W2 for the story. I do honestly think that anyone expecting a truly stand-out story from a mainline Pokemon game nowadays is basically crazy, but I will at least say that I think Gen 5 does have the best fully in-game story out of all generations. Obviously some translated well to outside media, but in terms of only what's in the games themselves I think Gen 5 wins. You can tell that's the case considering they actually made true sequels to it.
I think what makes these stories feel the best though is that they just feel super reasonable, but still dire and important. Team Plasma as a team is the one Team in the entire franchise whose goals make the most sense, but they still aim to do tons of irreparable damage with the legendary Pokemon and so on. Teams like Skull, Yell, and Star do make sense too, but at this point I think we can agree that the whole "they're just troublemakers" vibe has worn thin, even though the first two of those did have bigger evils in their games. Rocket makes sense too, but they didn't have a big, climactic battle in any game, so they're still missing in that department. Aqua and Magma are pretty standard in both ways, but I do like that once each leader gets their way, they realize they fucked up. Galactic is my favorite Team, and their existence does make sense when you can literally capture the gods that created the universe in a funky little ball, but they are basically just a cult run by a sociopath. I want a Team that can reasonably think that what their doing will improve the world, and that they are planning radical takeovers to make it happen. I guess that kind of relates to the Aether Foundation and Macro Cosmos, since they were both aiming to improve the world but at the cost of one Pokemon's well-being/at high risk to the world at large, or however you'd interpret what they're doing, but I do feel like we need to go back to non-"twist" villains at least once to make the twist villains feel better again. I feel like Quasartico from ZA are going to be the same way, so we will really need a refresher lol (that being said overall the Aether Foundation is easily my all-time favorite Team-adjacent group, I am very much into their vibes)
All other parts of Pokemon stories are much harder to gauge in super succinct ways, but I still think the other characters of Gen 5 are great, especially since we get to see a ton of them like Cheren and Bianca progress their lives in the sequels. I do think their vibe of "calculating, serious battler" and "casual, friendly battler" are a great combo for rivals so people can get a taste of both without being overrun by like 5 casual friends and 1 guy with an at all competent team like in XY. I do also like Hau and Hop (despite them being borderline carbon copies of each other, even down to their names) for being a friendly, optimistic battler at first that you break the spirits of towards the middle of the game, only for them to come back much stronger later for their big final fight, where they then accept that they still enjoy battling, even if they lose (which is good, since neither have intimidating battles lol). I do think one of the biggest reverse-scapegoats of Pokemon is the concept of the "asshole rival," as if you'd somehow like a game more if you could beat up some meanie child who's annoying your player character. I'm not saying you have some unresolved business to deal with, but I am kind of saying it. No matter what, I do think having multiple rival-type trainers to fight is a great idea, especially since they can come from completely different places both in terms of mindsets and in terms of story. Something like Sword and Shield is great at that too, with Hop, Marnie, and Bede all having their own arcs. Honestly I kind of think Bede is one of the most underrated rivals, I don't know why I like him so much.
One hypothetical rival I'd want to see is a character like Hau, except he is absolutely insane at battling, but is still super patronizing to you when you lose to him. He heals your team up to full before each battle, absolutely destroys you, and afterwards he's like "It's okay buddy, you'll get 'em next time!" and then goes away, not letting you rematch him after each loss. I don't even think I'd enjoy fighting him myself, but I think it would be funny in the name of annoying the more annoying people in the fanbase. It would be annoying by design, though.
Aside from that, it's hard to really say what's best in terms of themes and other stuff like that, since it basically requires the whole story to work with it in order to work at all. That being said, I kinda feel like Zekrom and Reshiram kind of fall flat in being manifestations of Truth and Ideals, since I genuinely cannot ever remember which is which. Like, how does a dragon with a generator for a tail represent either of those? I at least like the concept of Black and White being two opposing forces in the games, and the fact that significant portions of the environments/towns change depending on versions is insanely cool and I want that back, but the Pokemon themselves feel too abstracted from what they represent to really work in that way for me. It's a cool idea on paper of course, I just see those Pokemon as cool dragons instead.
That also makes me think, I think we can all agree that were kind of done with the whole two-parallel-versions thing right? Arceus and ZA hopefully showed that we don't NEED two different versions. Of course, as long as we keep buying our favorite of the two versions, some of us buying both, they're going to keep doing it, and that's like, fine I guess. It's not the end of the world, but I would rather not have to deal with it, especially when you can accidentally buy DLC for the wrong version. I guess the solution to that would be to have more choices like the Starters or the fossils of classic games, where choosing one essentially locks you out of the others, still encouraging you to interact with others and trade. I don't know, just a thought.
Now for the actual designs of Pokemon, humans and everything else… which I'm really only bringing up to say that I genuinely don't think there's any value in saying we should get one game's design philosophy back, since I think acting like we have a concrete idea of any design philosophy in any generation is classic fandom-loser faire. Believe it or not, you can't just know what Gamefreak is going for just by seeing what we got. There's so much extra junk that goes on under the hood, particularly in the amount that soulless execs/higher ups affect the design of every part of the game.
Anyway, I genuinely think each generation has its ups and downs for designs. My personal favorites are gens 4 and 5, but I have Pokemon I deeply love from all generations (but significantly less favorites from gen 2, sorry not sorry) and Pokemon I borderline hate/feel nothing for from all generations. If I had to theorycraft about what's going on under the hood, I wouldn't be surprised if Gamefreak has two lists of mons that are like "These are massive hitters, people are going to love these and we're going to promote them to hell" and "These guys work, but definitely aren't going to be the key selling points" and then they just smatter each generation with a couple of both so everything stays more balanced.
Same goes for the humans, to an extent. I personally think human designs have only gotten better in time, and it only feels like SV was a step down because of the horrible graphics, as I mentioned above. The actual designs weren't the problem, there were a ton I actually think are some of the best in the franchise, and that are very clearly beloved by the fans. If anything, I think a lot of older designs are kind of plain, and need a modern face-lift. I'm still mad that we didn't get buffed redesigns of Team Galactic in BDSP like Aqua and Magma did in ORAS, they would've gone INSANE
I do often hear about people wanting voice acting for the games, and even though that would obviously be necessary for some parts (I'm looking at you, Pierce) I would probably just turn it off the instant I get the game, or if possible I'd switch it to a different language so I don't have to be mired by my complex impression of the vocal performance. Obviously lots of the characters have game VAs due to Masters, but whenever I hear them I'm just like "Huh, interesting. Anyway, I never want to hear you speak again." I could at least do with some random hmms and hums when in non-cutscene dialogue though, that wouldn't be too annoying.
Anyway I guess that's basically it, idk what more to say so
