What Pokémon needs.
By Fallen189 4 Comments
More of this. Delicious dawn feet, and a Piplup banging a soup can. Look at his eyes.
LOOK HOW ANGRY HE IS.
Do you know why?
Because Pokémon is a shadow of what it used to be. No more is it about petty crooks, Gym leaders (L.T Surge- He covered wars ya know?), and adventuring. It's now about collecting fucking 8 billion Pokémon, training them up on EV points, getting IVs, making your 8th generation snorlax breed with a 3rd generation Ditto to get a 4th generation move. Urgh.
I remember the year 1999. High school was a year away, the millenium was due to destroy us all with the Y2k, and Pokémon had come out. My mum was picking me up from school, and I asked if she got me Pokémon from the store, and she said no. This made me sulk and get in a mood all the way home. Then I got home, and on my bed....there it lay:
I was literally speechless. I screamed some incomprehensible words down the stairs, shut my door, fired up my RED Gameboy pocket ( A RED GAME IN A RED GAME BOY - I WAS THE BEES KNEES) and got going. Never before, or never SINCE has a game hit me with such a "Holy shit" feeling that the original Pokémon game did. Whether it was training up in Viridian forest, wondering why anyone would ever pick a Weedle/Caterpie (Almost impossible to find in Red anyway), getting on board the SS.Anne for the first time, trying to make my way through Dark Tunnel without Flash (Which I did), or traversing through Victory road, to finally become a Pokémon master. All of these things just add up to an amazing feeling...until you reach the end of a tunnel, and Gary Oaks music pierces your ears like the well sharpened knife of a serial killer, and he beats you right back to the Pokémon centre.
I hated that motherfucker.
Years past, and more Pokémon games were released. They were all pretty good, especially G/S/C, but none of them had that initial "Wow" factor that the original had. And I remember Pokémon red. We had the 3 legendary birds, and a Mewtwo. None of this bullshit about 36 legendarys who fly around the world and can only be found if you fly around the world 18 times after them, take 4 steps up, 9 steps left, and when you throw the Pokéball you hold up and SPAM the B button (Don't lie to me, you all had some variation of this)
I look at the recent variations of Pokemon, and what do I see. Infinite legendarys, cookie cutter teams and definite strategies, specific ways to beat specific teams. Sorry am I playing Pokémon, or World of Warcraft?
Here is what the Pokémon franchise needs to insert to make it better, and improve upon:-
-No EVs
-Customizable trainer
-Returning to previous regions after the E4
-Gym leaders that continue to level up
-More fire pokemon accessable early in game
-Less legendary pokemon (a trio, and two or so others are fine)
-Less super-crazy world-destroying badguys (Team Rocket was perfect as just a bunch of criminals)
-3D battles using 2D sprites and backgrounds with sweeping camera, ala Golden Sun series. It'd maintain the charm of the handheld graphics' legacy, but actually look like a post-GBA game.
I think that should suffice.