redwoodalchan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
redwoodalchan) wrote2013-08-15 05:17 pm
redwoodalchan) wrote2013-08-15 05:17 pm
I'm actually prepared to agree with the nostalgia whores about something!
Don't get me wrong--I still think they're the scourge of the Pokemon fandom. But they have a point when they note that the mechanics that worked perfectly well in the Kanto and Johto games do not necessarily work as well in the games that came after.
The basic mechanic of the Pokemon games in the main series is and always has been fairly straightforward: you catch pokemon, and then you use them to fight other pokemon, be they wild pokemon or pokemon with trainers attached to them. And in the first- and second-generation games that worked just fine because those games had no real storyline--the entire objective of them was to simply defeat all the increasingly powerful trainers in the game and prove you were the best. But starting with the Hoenn games, they started to introduce something resembling a coherent storyline, and while in a lot of ways that was pretty cool, it created problems. Because the mechanics of the games didn't change, they now had all these complex plots, every one of which had to be resolved by having a pokemon battle, regardless of what the most appropriate course of action would realistically be in that situation (to cite a favorite example, if N thinks it's so wrong to make pokemon fight, why does he keep challenging you to battles?).
So while I'm never going to think that the first- and second-generation games are superior to the ones that came after, I will say that it does seem as though the games have "outgrown" their original mechanics, as it were, at least by the time Generation V rolled around. Of course, Generation V also introduced some significant changes to the gameplay (such as ending the game after the big bad has been defeated, thus ending the main storyline, rather than after you become champion), so it may be that they're aware of this and working on it for the next gen.
The basic mechanic of the Pokemon games in the main series is and always has been fairly straightforward: you catch pokemon, and then you use them to fight other pokemon, be they wild pokemon or pokemon with trainers attached to them. And in the first- and second-generation games that worked just fine because those games had no real storyline--the entire objective of them was to simply defeat all the increasingly powerful trainers in the game and prove you were the best. But starting with the Hoenn games, they started to introduce something resembling a coherent storyline, and while in a lot of ways that was pretty cool, it created problems. Because the mechanics of the games didn't change, they now had all these complex plots, every one of which had to be resolved by having a pokemon battle, regardless of what the most appropriate course of action would realistically be in that situation (to cite a favorite example, if N thinks it's so wrong to make pokemon fight, why does he keep challenging you to battles?).
So while I'm never going to think that the first- and second-generation games are superior to the ones that came after, I will say that it does seem as though the games have "outgrown" their original mechanics, as it were, at least by the time Generation V rolled around. Of course, Generation V also introduced some significant changes to the gameplay (such as ending the game after the big bad has been defeated, thus ending the main storyline, rather than after you become champion), so it may be that they're aware of this and working on it for the next gen.