Prove you're not a mindless drone

Say one negative thing about HGSS or Gen 5.

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  1. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Bad level curve
    >Gen 5
    No walking Pokemon

  2. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGGS
    i dont like how some battle themes were remixed (mainly the gym leader theme)

    >BW
    i dont like most unovamons

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      Holy shit, this, I loved the original Gen 2 battle themes (and music in general) because they were...concise? In what they were going for. I wish I knew more about music so I could articulate it better, but HGSS' music, especially the battle themes, were all over the fricking place, it felt like they were throwing instruments at the wall to make it sound more "epic" or exciting or something instead of just leaning on the good baseline made from the original and using a select few instruments to make it sound as good as possible. I had this issue in ORAS too where they had these massive orchestial arrangements for the music and in turn made them sound dull and unmemorible, as if people didn't actually love the brass sounding soundtrack of the original.

      Does anyone know what I mean? It bugs me that I don't have the right words to say what I mean...Anyways that's my only real gripe with HGSS outside of maybe not having contensts.

      For BW I think my only problem is how much stuff relied on 3rd party, out of game features, like the Entra Link, Dream World, Joint Avenue, etc. It was probably really novel at the time, but I played BW2 long after Gen 5 ended and I definitely missed out on the core experience. Both HGSS and BW2 are the best games in the series though, and I think people are angry at how consistently highly rated both games are.

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Both HGSS and BW2 are the best games in the series though
        and platinum

        • 8 months ago
          Anonymous

          and emerald.

          bw2 really isn't that good. it's B-tier at best

          • 8 months ago
            Anonymous

            BW and BW/2 are the peak of the franchise and nothing comes close. I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

            • 8 months ago
              Anonymous

              nah those were the worst until gen 8

              • 8 months ago
                Anonymous

                the worst pre gen 8 game was DP and its not even a question, i know you're baiting for replies but at least just say you didnt like it instead of something so stupid

              • 8 months ago
                Anonymous

                the worst pre gen 8 games are BW and BW2. stop baiting homosexual

              • 8 months ago
                Anonymous

                Somebody who likes Gen 6/7 would say that. Too bad your opinion doesn’t matter, kek.

          • 8 months ago
            Anonymous

            >and emerald.
            eh, i could take it or leave it.

            Naw, holy trinity is BW2, HGSS and Emerald. Sinnoh is such an awful region and HGSS saved Gen 4.`

            nah those were the worst until gen 8

            discord posts

            • 8 months ago
              Anonymous

              only discordies like

              BW and BW/2 are the peak of the franchise and nothing comes close. I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

              defend gen v though

              Somebody who likes Gen 6/7 would say that. Too bad your opinion doesn’t matter, kek.

              gen v was the worst until gen 8. it's simple factgs

              • 8 months ago
                Anonymous

                You aren't smart enough to gaslight us anon

              • 8 months ago
                Anonymous

                shhh, stop derailing the thread, discord

        • 8 months ago
          Anonymous

          Naw, holy trinity is BW2, HGSS and Emerald. Sinnoh is such an awful region and HGSS saved Gen 4.`

  3. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    They didn't take much of the improvements from Crystal, most noticeably the distribution tweaks that really made Johto feel more unique.
    >Gen 5
    It ended too early. I get that they were eager to hop on the next system after having their foot half in the door with Dream Radar, but there were some things I would have liked to see make the cut like party following and auto run. Gen 5 was the peak and I'd do anything to go back and make it last.

  4. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    Anville Town was cool but pointless.

    Morty's redesign was a downgrade.

  5. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    there's nothing bad to say about hgss they're the series swan song and the peak of the franchise.

    there's nothing good to say about any gen v game. they're dogshit, the pokemon are hideous, the region is a linear railroaded circle based on muttmerica, the story is gay, the rvials are sycophants, there's Black folk everywhere, the animated sprites look disgusting, starters are awful, all of the gym leaders and e4 members are arbitrarily locked to 3-4 pokemon.
    just a mistake of a generation and the beginning of nu-pokemon

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      Mindless drone.

  6. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    This implies that it would be difficult or unusual to criticize HGSS or gen 5 for even small errors. Despite Johto fans' best attempts to convince eveyone, that is not true

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      HGSS
      >The new Safari Zone while interesting, is still a mess. It's not a great solution for the often lackluster Pokemon variety
      >Their philosophy since Gen 2's release had long since changed, so they really should have updated some of the notable NPC's teams
      Gen 5
      >There should've been more interconnected pathways to traverse the region
      >Far too many legendaries
      >Most absurd level requirements for evolutions in the series

      >Despite Johto fans' best attempts to convince eveyone, that is not true
      >Implying that a negligible sample size of a fanbase as being representative for its entirety

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >This implies that it would be difficult or unusual to criticize HGSS or gen 5 for even small errors
      Many posters on /vp/ would have you believe that. They view these games as the pinnacle of what Pokemon has to offer, so why not get them to criticize these games and see what they have to say.

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        >so why not get them to criticize these games
        they already do that gaytard

        • 8 months ago
          Anonymous

          Nah it comes from discord, not /vp/, and is done for (You) farming.

          • 8 months ago
            Anonymous

            It's real criticism, but dealing with that would mean that you have to acknowledge that there are flaws, so it's a lot easier to blame the Genwunners/Yawngay/Discord

            • 8 months ago
              Anonymous

              Real criticism about HGSS and Gen 5 hasn't been posted in years. Spammed macro images and template threads for (You) baiting isn't criticism.
              >Genwunners
              Don't exist.
              >Yawngay
              A pure shitposter who knows he's being disingenuous. Never provided real criticism.
              >Discord
              Unovagays who admit they like the games but shitpost against them because they crave (You)s.

              • 8 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Unovagays who admit they like the games but shitpost against them because they crave (You)s.
                discord kiddies are kalosperm

  7. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    CUTSCENES CUTSCENES CUTSCENES
    INTERRUPTIONS AND ROADBLOCKS OUT THE ASS
    HGSS DIDN'T BOTHER FIXING A FRICKING THING FROM GSC AND ONLY INTRODUCED NEW FRICKING ISSUES LIKE OOPS CAN'T GET LEAFEON OR GLACEON :*~~)
    EVERY POKEMON IN GEN 5 IS A WORTHLESS PILE OF SHIT TO WHERE THE ENTIRE REGION CAN GET SWEPT BY STARMIE
    *17* *FRICKING* *RIVAL* *BATTLES* IN BLACK AND WHITE

    Is that good enough?

  8. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Being post split, my bro Typhlosion wasn't as good as he should have been.
    >Gen 5
    The story in BW2 wasn't as good as the fist.

  9. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Never found Pokéathlon fun in the slighest. Very boring and I dislike that its the most reliable way to get evolution stones before Kantom. Also, copy pasting the Sinnoh frontier to count as more content feels a little cheap.
    >Gen 5
    Like half of its dex consists of the worst designs in the series. Shit like the mons design to be blatant copies of kantomons are generally really bad.

  10. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    HGSS didn't fix half of GSC's flaws, and gets carried by D/P's cross gen evos. Gen 5 is linear as frick

  11. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    i will not

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      no instead i will shit on gen 7 an actual bad game

      I not a drone because I wont do what you tell me do like the npcs in this threads lol

      Found the mindless drones.

  12. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Safari Zone is unnecessarily obtuse
    >Gen 5
    Limited Pokedex in BW1 sucked, I do not enjoy getting the same pool of Pokemon every route with one change or maybe an evolved form

    Also I like Kalos and hate discordBlack folk

  13. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Getting 200 Medalist Pokemon to complete the Pokeathlon is tedious as hell.
    Some of the remixes suck, and the color palette at night and morning doesn't look as good as it did in GSC. GB Sounds is not accurate, so smooth melodies like New Bark Town and Surf sound like garbage, and it's only accessible well after beating the whole game.
    Safari Zone is needlessly obtuse, and placing down blocks one by one is tedious in its own right. An attempt to fix mon distribution was there in it, Pokewalker, and the new route added inbetween the Safari Zone and Cianwood, but it's hard to realize when none of the NPCs use mons like Misdreavus, and Murkrow is still marked as "Area Unknown" on the map.
    Probably the best iteration of followmons considering the grid-based movement actually allows them to keep up with you, but I wish you could select your partner instead of it always being your lead.
    >Gen 5
    BW1's pacing as a game is bad. Early variety is nonexistent, basically forcing you into using a set squad before opening up at Santalune Forest. All towns before postgame being gym towns makes the game feel like a loop of gym battle->route->gym battle without much to space it apart, and the rivals don't fare much better, with the most egregious being the back to back to back rival battles after Castelia. The "big postgame" is only big because of locations being arbitrarily locked and the design of the region being so linear, it'd be like if locales like Fallarbor, Pacifidlog or Celestic were tied to postgame and shoved in one corner.
    Most of the extra content being tied to Dream World and EoSing means a lot of things are unobtainable now.
    BW2's forced Pokestars tutorial stinks.

    As a whole, I love HGSS, don't like BW1, and like BW2.

  14. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Most of HGSS's problems are from either Gen 2 or Gen 4, whether it be minor game design or engine issues, even though it tries to fix both. I guess the worst things exclusive to HGSS are probably the Safari Zone not being well explained in game (which isn't necessarily a bad thing but given how complex it is I would have liked any indication at all) and the fact that the GB sounds are really off.
    >Gen 5
    EXP scaling should have been a toggle, even if you want it for the story mode it should be available after the credits. No, the Lucky Egg during the story is not a good replacement for it. This isn't even getting into the individual game's problems during the early-game, but I want to note special note of B2W2's EXP cap that exists for some fricking reason.

  15. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    Level curve
    Linear region

  16. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    no instead i will shit on gen 7 an actual bad game

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      gen 7 is the best actually
      only gen to change the stale formula and actually have gameplay beyond mashing a

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        This, plus it ended gen 6 which is probably the best thing any generation has ever done

  17. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    Was it just me or was HGSS just not memorable?

  18. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    They're the best games in the series by far but there's plenty wrong with them, as all Pokemon games. They're too easy during the main story, this is universal in all games. The way to tell if lack of difficulty is an issue in any given video game is to evaluate how wasted the depth of its systems are due to that lack of challenge, and Pokemon has a VERY bad case of that. EVs, IVs, natures, moveset optimization, type coverage, and every other part of team building and decision making is wasted by the lack of challenge. This means you can point out the lack of challenge as an objective flaw, as the depth of the in-game systems is being wasted (ie: engaging with those systems is a waste of time as it doesn't correlate with your success, overleveling your starter and clicking A will win the game).

    HGSS rewards overleveling 1-2 Pokemon over building a full team way too much, as options to level up new members later into the game are very limited. It has the worst case of "overlevel your starter, spam A, win" described above. Meanwhile if you try to play with 6 or more Pokemon, you will suffer due to a lack of levels. This means trying to play the game in the most interesting way and building a full team gets you nothing but punishment.

    BW2 has arguably the biggest amount of single player content in the franchise, but much of that content suffers from total irrelevancy to the core gameplay. Remember Pokestar studios? Of course you do, it's forced on you and kills the pacing of the game quite early on. Remember the musicals? You didn't, did you?
    The PWT is great, Join Avenue is arguably great too since it builds off the core gameplay/gives you helpful resources, but outside of that the side content is weak. BW1 suffers from a severe lack of early game Pokemon variety, arguably even worse than Diamond/Pearl, making replaying the game a repetitive chore (BW2 fixed this).

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Meanwhile if you try to play with 6 or more Pokemon, you will suffer due to a lack of levels. This means trying to play the game in the most interesting way and building a full team gets you nothing but punishment.
      I would like to disagree with that. Despite what you said being true, the fact that you're so limited on levels (Unless you grind, but that's absolutely not necessary) is where the fun gameplay emerges.
      While even then there's a lot of things you don't need to care about, you start to reach a point where you do need to interact with some of the mechanics.
      Again, this isn't so much that you're wrong on the general point, but that it's where you (Or I, at least) can find actual enjoyment out of the games.
      Funnily, this is where the "level curve" issue comes into play. Because of wild Pokemon (And a bunch of trainers in the early-to-midgame) are so low level, it's hard to level up new Pokemon, like you say. But that's only an issue if you're a new player who doesn't already know what kind of team they're running with. You should be perfectly able to handle the game with just about any 6 mon team (Obvious shitmon like Unown not included) without ever stopping to grind.
      Ironically, that helps GSC/HGSS in terms of managing the game's difficulty curve nicely when you do use a full team.
      Red especially is a great fight because you're going to reach him in the mid-50's, low-60's at best, which makes him a fitting final boss. He's not protected by 4 other buttholes, so he has to stand on his own in that regard.

      This is also why no game with forced Exp. Share will ever offer that kind of experience. If you try to run the games with 6 Pokemon, you'll never be underleveled.

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      I was eirh you til i read your actual arguments
      >EVs, IVs, natures, moveset optimization, type coverage, and every other part of team building and decision making is wasted by the lack of challenge
      These things weren't invented to be exploited to begin with.
      >HGSS rewards overleveling 1-2 Pokemon over building a full team way too much, as options to level up new members later into the game are very limited. It has the worst case of "overlevel your starter, spam A, win" described above. Meanwhile if you try to play with 6 or more Pokemon, you will suffer due to a lack of levels. This means trying to play the game in the most interesting way and building a full team gets you nothing but punishment.
      Good luck beating Clair or Lance unless u run Feraligatr with IceMoves.

  19. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    I not a drone because I wont do what you tell me do like the npcs in this threads lol

  20. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    They both have endings

  21. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Following pokemon are fricking annoying
    >Gen 5
    Not a fan of the animated sprites

  22. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    How does saying one negative thing about HGSS or Gen5 make someone “not a drone”? If anything doing something solely because some rando on e Lithuanian spoon collecting forum said would be drone-like. If I have something negative to say about HGSS or Gen5 I’ll do it one my own terms.

  23. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    They could've improved a little bit the "open map" section during the fifth, sixth and seventh gym. Maybe like giving an higher level team to the gym leader if you defeated another first.
    >BW
    Pokémon distribution at the beginning is pretty limiting
    >B2W2
    Could've removed the limit for gym leaders to only use max 3 pokémon in battle and 4 for the Elite Four in the first match. Pokéthlon had no reason to be mandatory to interact with to progress, they only ended up souring the player's opinion on the minigame

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Could've removed the limit for gym leaders to only use max 3 pokémon in battle and 4 for the Elite Four in the first match. Pokéthlon had no reason to be mandatory to interact with to progress, they only ended up souring the player's opinion on the minigame
      Pokeathlon? I'm gonna assume you mean PokeStar Studios here, since the former is in HGSS (And not mandatory)
      But BW2 does remove those limits. On Challenge Mode. Now, the actual easy criticism here is that why the frick are difficulty settings locked behind either clearing the game or interacting with people who have? That shit is absolutely moronic.

  24. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    HGSS
    >No ribbons for Pokeathalon
    >Not all Pokemon follow you indoors
    >Spiky Earred Pichu is locked to those games
    >No Sinnoh features like Chaining, Double Battles, Contests, ect.

    Black/White
    >3/5 bridge themes are just ok
    >Would've been cool to have more legendaries appear, like Mewtwo in a Plasma lab or Lugia/Kyogre hidden inside the ruins
    >Mega Mewtwo Y from the Genesect movie should've been Mewthree, a plasma attempt to clone Mewtwo
    >You have to battle a higher level Elite 4 to battle the champion

    I still love HG and Black, best Pokemon games in my opinion

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >You have to battle a higher level Elite 4 to battle the champion
      That's already what happens anon

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >>No ribbons for Pokeathalon
      You get medals, dont you?

      >Spiky Earred Pichu is locked to those games
      That's not really HGSSs fault. Thats on later games for not letting it carry over.

      >Say one negative thing about HGSS or Gen 5.
      BW2 is poorly made because it has no difficulty and virtually no meaningful interaction during the campaign, and the postgame is gutted for lazily implemented nostalgia wank and reused maps with zero replayability.

      All the Trainers and Gym Leaders use Pokémon with 0 EVs so they're extremely easy to sweep with a single overleveled Pokémon. Unlike previous (and newer) games, the Gym Leaders only use three Pokémon, often with unoptimal movesets, and the Elite Four only use four Pokémon.
      The EXP balancing is such that overleveling even multiple Pokemon is extraordinarily easy and the game never gives you a real reason to use more than one Pokémon due to said overleveling rendering the other's games mechanics such as type matchups completely redundant, on top of the fact that there's no party wide EXP Share, meaning the game actually punishes you for training multiple Pokémon since you are just splitting EXP for no benefit when you could just be min/maxing it to one Pokémon instead. The game then gives you a Lucky Egg literally for free during the story, despite it being extremely difficult to obtain in earlier games for balancing reasons, further breaking the game's difficulty so it's even more of a joke.
      The Challenge Mode, which is not only virtually impossible to use without hacking thanks to its obtuse requirement of having to connect with someone else who already beat a specific version of the game to transfer you a key (you can't even beat the game yourself and restart the save file since restarting your save file ALSO deletes the key...), isn't even programmed correctly, with enemy opponents having the stats of their original levels, resulting in getting even MORE inflated EXP while fighting opponents that are equally as easy, making the game even easier than if you didn't use Challenge Mode.

      1/?

      >the fact that there's no party wide EXP Share, meaning the game actually punishes you for training multiple Pokémon since you are just splitting EXP for no benefit when you could just be min/maxing it to one Pokémon instead
      Tell me youre a zoomer without telling me youre a zoomer.

  25. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >Say one negative thing about HGSS or Gen 5.
    BW2 is poorly made because it has no difficulty and virtually no meaningful interaction during the campaign, and the postgame is gutted for lazily implemented nostalgia wank and reused maps with zero replayability.

    All the Trainers and Gym Leaders use Pokémon with 0 EVs so they're extremely easy to sweep with a single overleveled Pokémon. Unlike previous (and newer) games, the Gym Leaders only use three Pokémon, often with unoptimal movesets, and the Elite Four only use four Pokémon.
    The EXP balancing is such that overleveling even multiple Pokemon is extraordinarily easy and the game never gives you a real reason to use more than one Pokémon due to said overleveling rendering the other's games mechanics such as type matchups completely redundant, on top of the fact that there's no party wide EXP Share, meaning the game actually punishes you for training multiple Pokémon since you are just splitting EXP for no benefit when you could just be min/maxing it to one Pokémon instead. The game then gives you a Lucky Egg literally for free during the story, despite it being extremely difficult to obtain in earlier games for balancing reasons, further breaking the game's difficulty so it's even more of a joke.
    The Challenge Mode, which is not only virtually impossible to use without hacking thanks to its obtuse requirement of having to connect with someone else who already beat a specific version of the game to transfer you a key (you can't even beat the game yourself and restart the save file since restarting your save file ALSO deletes the key...), isn't even programmed correctly, with enemy opponents having the stats of their original levels, resulting in getting even MORE inflated EXP while fighting opponents that are equally as easy, making the game even easier than if you didn't use Challenge Mode.

    1/?

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      Every remotely long area has at least one doctor NPC who will heal your Pokémon completely for free. So actually losing in this game is virtually impossible without handicapping yourself.

      The game has an absurd number of tutorials and roadblocks, such that the campaign involves virtually no gameplay outside of mashing through text and going where NPCs want you to go. The game has no respect for the players intelligence; unlike Gen 1, 2, 8, and 9, the catching tutorial and Pokemon Center tutorials are forced. Dialogue options that seemingly give you the choice to skip explanations give you the explanation anyway even if you select the negative option (e.g. Mr. Medal's explanation on medals). After Virbank Gym you're led around and forced to do a tutorial for a side mode that has virtually nothing to do with the entire rest of the game, and in of itself isn't even engaging because it consists of "select the obvious correct option to progress the script", so it's just more mashing through meaningless shit.

      Afterward, you can finally get to Castelia City. This is where you can tell the developers started putting noticeably less effort into the game and its holes as a rehash start to show. The map is almost entirely the same as BW1, and there are NPCs with nonsensically copy/pasted dialogue from BW1. The rest of the game is like this the last two gyms. The north is unsurprisingly roadblocked. The east entrance is also roadblocked for no real reason except to trick people into thinking the game is great for having a padded post-game instead of giving the player any agency (want to start breeding your Pokémon early? Frick you). So the only choice is to go is the new area, the sewer. However, since the game doesn't respect the player's intelligence, there's a worker blocking it until you talk to Iris to specifically lead you there.

      2/?

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        Once you get to the Sewer there are more roadblocks and you can't fully explore it until you backtrack without your rival following and constantly healing you.
        After Castelia City and Route 4 there's yet another forced tutorial for the Join Avenue, which is basically just a tool to grind out items (some of which are inferior to other games, such as the Berry Shop, when in Gen 3-4 and 6-7 you can simply farm them for free). The catch is that it requires communicating with other players to fill up. So if you have no one to play with you're SOL and this area is completely useless.
        Nimbasa City and Route 5/16 play pretty much the same as BW1. Both bridges are roadblocked until the game wants you to access them and the forced Pokémon Musical tutorial is replaced with a forced Pokémon Grotto tutorial.

        At Driftveil City there are three (!) roadblocks, one for Clay Tunnel, one for the PWT, and one in Chargestone Cave. So like usual you're forced mash through the order the game forces you to do things.
        The rest of the game progresses the same way. Go through route, reach town, do the one thing the game actually lets you do, rinse and repeat. One hilarious thing that the game changes from BW1 is how you encounter the Swords of Justice. Instead of being hidden away in different areas of the game, they instead just stand there in the middle of routes for the player to easily encounter with zero effort during the story.

        3/?

        • 8 months ago
          Anonymous

          Rather than a Battle Frontier like the previous upper versions, they decided to add the Pokémon World Tournament, which is a complete downgrade gameplay wise, deciding to trade the streak based systems of the previous battle facilities with a simple tournament bracket which only requires three wins. This completely trivializes the difficulty to the point where even an unoptimized campaign team can easily clear it and kills the point of even bothering to play it rather than just going to PvP. The main appeal of this mode appears to be the spectacle of seeing all the previous characters magically (and nonsensically) show up in this brand new facility in this remote region. If you like to clap at dangling keys rather than have engaging, challenging gameplay, you might enjoy this.
          An additional battle facility they added was the Black Tower/White Treehollow. This is effectively a clone of the Battle Pyramid from Emerald, except with the key difference that you can use your full campaign team with levels not scaled, and you gain EXP like normal. Meaning, like the rest of the campaign, you can easily sweep through it with your overleveled team like usual, and the difficulty and replayability of it is gutted as a result.

          The rest of the postgame effectively just involves walking through old reused BW1 maps that have new Trainers on them while easily sweeping through them and further overleveling your Pokémon. Nothing about it is engaging and you never have a reason to revisit the maps again since there's no repeatable content.

          4/?

          • 8 months ago
            Anonymous

            Outside of the gameplay itself, the rest of the game is poorly polished. The sprites are animated horribly with robotic tweening rather than being redrawn manually by hand,
            resulting in the sprites being broken and distorted every time they move. The back sprites are inconsistently scaled and are zoomed by *2 like Gen 1, making them look horribly pixelated and low resolution compared to the DS's screen.
            The Pokemon are locked in their single idle animation so all the move animations are lazily stapled onto the Pokémon. If you want to see Charizard using Flamethrower out of its shoulder, maybe you'll like the animations.

            The bottom screen is the same as BW1, the C-Gear, which is effectively useless the entire game since it displays no useful information. This is far cry from useful bottom screens that had various tools such as DPPt's Poketch which had various apps, HGSS's bottom screen which allowed you to easily access registered items or run automatically (which was nonsensically removed) or XY's bottom screen which allows you to track your team's stats and see everyone around you online or locally. The game lacks the QoL additions from newer games, such as Destiny Knot breeding, Ability Capsules, Ability Patches, Bottle Caps, and Mints, so training Pokémon for online play is frustrating and tedious.

            The music is decent but they made the stupid choice to replace it with a badly done low HP beeping remix whenever your Pokémon happens to drop to low HP, which completely ruins the atmosphere of the battle.

            If you don't care about a game with well crafted gameplay, and instead want to gawk at all the returning characters and the number of maps the game decided to pointlessly lock to after the credits, then you'll think this game is good.

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      Every remotely long area has at least one doctor NPC who will heal your Pokémon completely for free. So actually losing in this game is virtually impossible without handicapping yourself.

      The game has an absurd number of tutorials and roadblocks, such that the campaign involves virtually no gameplay outside of mashing through text and going where NPCs want you to go. The game has no respect for the players intelligence; unlike Gen 1, 2, 8, and 9, the catching tutorial and Pokemon Center tutorials are forced. Dialogue options that seemingly give you the choice to skip explanations give you the explanation anyway even if you select the negative option (e.g. Mr. Medal's explanation on medals). After Virbank Gym you're led around and forced to do a tutorial for a side mode that has virtually nothing to do with the entire rest of the game, and in of itself isn't even engaging because it consists of "select the obvious correct option to progress the script", so it's just more mashing through meaningless shit.

      Afterward, you can finally get to Castelia City. This is where you can tell the developers started putting noticeably less effort into the game and its holes as a rehash start to show. The map is almost entirely the same as BW1, and there are NPCs with nonsensically copy/pasted dialogue from BW1. The rest of the game is like this the last two gyms. The north is unsurprisingly roadblocked. The east entrance is also roadblocked for no real reason except to trick people into thinking the game is great for having a padded post-game instead of giving the player any agency (want to start breeding your Pokémon early? Frick you). So the only choice is to go is the new area, the sewer. However, since the game doesn't respect the player's intelligence, there's a worker blocking it until you talk to Iris to specifically lead you there.

      2/?

      i'm screencapping this legendary thread

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      Every remotely long area has at least one doctor NPC who will heal your Pokémon completely for free. So actually losing in this game is virtually impossible without handicapping yourself.

      The game has an absurd number of tutorials and roadblocks, such that the campaign involves virtually no gameplay outside of mashing through text and going where NPCs want you to go. The game has no respect for the players intelligence; unlike Gen 1, 2, 8, and 9, the catching tutorial and Pokemon Center tutorials are forced. Dialogue options that seemingly give you the choice to skip explanations give you the explanation anyway even if you select the negative option (e.g. Mr. Medal's explanation on medals). After Virbank Gym you're led around and forced to do a tutorial for a side mode that has virtually nothing to do with the entire rest of the game, and in of itself isn't even engaging because it consists of "select the obvious correct option to progress the script", so it's just more mashing through meaningless shit.

      Afterward, you can finally get to Castelia City. This is where you can tell the developers started putting noticeably less effort into the game and its holes as a rehash start to show. The map is almost entirely the same as BW1, and there are NPCs with nonsensically copy/pasted dialogue from BW1. The rest of the game is like this the last two gyms. The north is unsurprisingly roadblocked. The east entrance is also roadblocked for no real reason except to trick people into thinking the game is great for having a padded post-game instead of giving the player any agency (want to start breeding your Pokémon early? Frick you). So the only choice is to go is the new area, the sewer. However, since the game doesn't respect the player's intelligence, there's a worker blocking it until you talk to Iris to specifically lead you there.

      2/?

      Once you get to the Sewer there are more roadblocks and you can't fully explore it until you backtrack without your rival following and constantly healing you.
      After Castelia City and Route 4 there's yet another forced tutorial for the Join Avenue, which is basically just a tool to grind out items (some of which are inferior to other games, such as the Berry Shop, when in Gen 3-4 and 6-7 you can simply farm them for free). The catch is that it requires communicating with other players to fill up. So if you have no one to play with you're SOL and this area is completely useless.
      Nimbasa City and Route 5/16 play pretty much the same as BW1. Both bridges are roadblocked until the game wants you to access them and the forced Pokémon Musical tutorial is replaced with a forced Pokémon Grotto tutorial.

      At Driftveil City there are three (!) roadblocks, one for Clay Tunnel, one for the PWT, and one in Chargestone Cave. So like usual you're forced mash through the order the game forces you to do things.
      The rest of the game progresses the same way. Go through route, reach town, do the one thing the game actually lets you do, rinse and repeat. One hilarious thing that the game changes from BW1 is how you encounter the Swords of Justice. Instead of being hidden away in different areas of the game, they instead just stand there in the middle of routes for the player to easily encounter with zero effort during the story.

      3/?

      Rather than a Battle Frontier like the previous upper versions, they decided to add the Pokémon World Tournament, which is a complete downgrade gameplay wise, deciding to trade the streak based systems of the previous battle facilities with a simple tournament bracket which only requires three wins. This completely trivializes the difficulty to the point where even an unoptimized campaign team can easily clear it and kills the point of even bothering to play it rather than just going to PvP. The main appeal of this mode appears to be the spectacle of seeing all the previous characters magically (and nonsensically) show up in this brand new facility in this remote region. If you like to clap at dangling keys rather than have engaging, challenging gameplay, you might enjoy this.
      An additional battle facility they added was the Black Tower/White Treehollow. This is effectively a clone of the Battle Pyramid from Emerald, except with the key difference that you can use your full campaign team with levels not scaled, and you gain EXP like normal. Meaning, like the rest of the campaign, you can easily sweep through it with your overleveled team like usual, and the difficulty and replayability of it is gutted as a result.

      The rest of the postgame effectively just involves walking through old reused BW1 maps that have new Trainers on them while easily sweeping through them and further overleveling your Pokémon. Nothing about it is engaging and you never have a reason to revisit the maps again since there's no repeatable content.

      4/?

      Outside of the gameplay itself, the rest of the game is poorly polished. The sprites are animated horribly with robotic tweening rather than being redrawn manually by hand,
      resulting in the sprites being broken and distorted every time they move. The back sprites are inconsistently scaled and are zoomed by *2 like Gen 1, making them look horribly pixelated and low resolution compared to the DS's screen.
      The Pokemon are locked in their single idle animation so all the move animations are lazily stapled onto the Pokémon. If you want to see Charizard using Flamethrower out of its shoulder, maybe you'll like the animations.

      The bottom screen is the same as BW1, the C-Gear, which is effectively useless the entire game since it displays no useful information. This is far cry from useful bottom screens that had various tools such as DPPt's Poketch which had various apps, HGSS's bottom screen which allowed you to easily access registered items or run automatically (which was nonsensically removed) or XY's bottom screen which allows you to track your team's stats and see everyone around you online or locally. The game lacks the QoL additions from newer games, such as Destiny Knot breeding, Ability Capsules, Ability Patches, Bottle Caps, and Mints, so training Pokémon for online play is frustrating and tedious.

      The music is decent but they made the stupid choice to replace it with a badly done low HP beeping remix whenever your Pokémon happens to drop to low HP, which completely ruins the atmosphere of the battle.

      If you don't care about a game with well crafted gameplay, and instead want to gawk at all the returning characters and the number of maps the game decided to pointlessly lock to after the credits, then you'll think this game is good.

      bravo anon you created the undebunkable post to end all shartnova shills

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >isn't even programmed correctly, with enemy opponents having the stats of their original levels, resulting in getting even MORE inflated EXP while fighting opponents that are equally as easy, making the game even easier than if you didn't use Challenge Mode.
      This is untrue on multiple levels.
      Firstly, it's intentional. If you look at how Easy Mode is done, it awards you less money because the levels are lower. Challenge Mode rewards more money due to the increased levels.
      Secondly, you yourself complain about the decreased Pokemon count as the primary reason why thee games are even easier than other games to sweep through, yet completely neglect to mention the part where Challenge Mode explicitly fixes that, alongside their movesets.

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Firstly, it's intentional.
        It being intentionally bad doesn't stop it from being bad.

        >Challenge Mode rewards more money due to the increased levels.
        So...it's intentional that they made Challenge Mode easier and Easy Mode harder? Arguing that Game Freak is moronic isn't the road I'd take to defend my favorite games, but whatever you say champ.

        >Secondly, you yourself complain about the decreased Pokemon count as the primary reason why thee games are even easier
        I never said it's the -primary- reason it's the games are even easier. Challenge Mode doesn't fix it, all it does is give you more garbage Pokemon to easily sweep and snowball your levels on even further.

        >The Challenge Mode, which is not only virtually impossible to use without hacking thanks to its obtuse requirement of having to connect with someone else who already beat a specific version of the game to transfer you a key (you can't even beat the game yourself and restart the save file since restarting your save file ALSO deletes the key...), isn't even programmed correctly, with enemy opponents having the stats of their original levels, resulting in getting even MORE inflated EXP while fighting opponents that are equally as easy, making the game even easier than if you didn't use Challenge Mode.
        This shit again?
        Challenge Mode is still an increase in difficulty.
        The increased levels matter, because level is part of the damage calculation. They also have better movesets, Held Items on some Pokemon, better AI, and go figure, maxed out IVs. Which also increases their stats.

        >Challenge Mode is still an increase in difficulty.
        It objectively isn't. Anyone who's actually played it and understands how the game works will tell you this.

        >because level is part of the damage calculation. They
        You're right! It is a part of damage calculation! Meaning the game becomes even easier when YOUR OWN Pokemon's levels become inflated by fighhting overleveled opponents with horrible stats. Thanks for bolstering my argument even more.

        >They also have better movesets, Held Items, better AI,
        What difference do these make if I 1HKO the Pokemon?

        >maxed out IVs
        What difference does this make if their stats are set 5 levels lower than they should be?

        Unova overworld looked nice but the battle sprites look genuinely weird to me, I don’t know when they started to become so highly praised. They aren’t truly animated, most waving their limbs around. Something like Pokémon Ranger animation is much more fluid.

        >I don’t know when they started to become so highly praised
        I've started to realize a lot of people have zero fricking standards when it comes to sprites and just mindlessly praise anything simply for using sprites regardless of their quality. People will scrutinize models for the smallest fricking things, but if the game is using sprites then somehow it instantly passes.

        >HGSS
        Nearly all of the interface changes vs. DPPt are awful. The bottom screen focused menu is unintuitive, running shoes toggle feels bad compared to a button, the bag is literally the worst it's ever been.
        >BW
        Unova has an uninspired layout, which has been carried on to every game past it. B2W2 somehow manages to be confusing while still feeling like a shitty straight line.

        >the bag is literally the worst it's ever been.
        You must not have played Scarlet & Violet.

        Both these posts are moronic. DPPt's bag is objectively worse than both. Have fun scrolling through 100 items in the laggy as frick screen.

        • 8 months ago
          Anonymous

          >It objectively isn't. Anyone who's actually played it and understands how the game works will tell you this.
          Funny, because Im telling you otherwise, and there are others that have done the same. Let's do a quick search.
          First non-Serebii result (Reddit, but who cares, we're being unbiased here)
          >For the most part, they weren't too different from the normal difficulty. Yes, they hit harder, but it as actually quite rare for them to withstand one hit even in the late game. I did have to heal a lot and almost every battle though, which is something I can't say about normal mode.
          >What difference do these make if I 1HKO the Pokemon?
          What difference does anything make at that point? EVs, IVs, nothing matters because you're playing the game in a way where you just one-shot everything and don't need to care. That's every single Pokemon game.
          >What difference does this make if their stats are set 5 levels lower than they should be?
          I don't know, what difference would higher stats for the same level matter.
          >You're right! It is a part of damage calculation! Meaning the game becomes even easier when YOUR OWN Pokemon's levels become inflated by fighhting overleveled opponents with horrible stats. Thanks for bolstering my argument even more.
          The difference is smaller. You'd end about 3 levels higher than before.

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >The Challenge Mode, which is not only virtually impossible to use without hacking thanks to its obtuse requirement of having to connect with someone else who already beat a specific version of the game to transfer you a key (you can't even beat the game yourself and restart the save file since restarting your save file ALSO deletes the key...), isn't even programmed correctly, with enemy opponents having the stats of their original levels, resulting in getting even MORE inflated EXP while fighting opponents that are equally as easy, making the game even easier than if you didn't use Challenge Mode.
      This shit again?
      Challenge Mode is still an increase in difficulty.
      The increased levels matter, because level is part of the damage calculation. They also have better movesets, Held Items on some Pokemon, better AI, and go figure, maxed out IVs. Which also increases their stats.

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      Every remotely long area has at least one doctor NPC who will heal your Pokémon completely for free. So actually losing in this game is virtually impossible without handicapping yourself.

      The game has an absurd number of tutorials and roadblocks, such that the campaign involves virtually no gameplay outside of mashing through text and going where NPCs want you to go. The game has no respect for the players intelligence; unlike Gen 1, 2, 8, and 9, the catching tutorial and Pokemon Center tutorials are forced. Dialogue options that seemingly give you the choice to skip explanations give you the explanation anyway even if you select the negative option (e.g. Mr. Medal's explanation on medals). After Virbank Gym you're led around and forced to do a tutorial for a side mode that has virtually nothing to do with the entire rest of the game, and in of itself isn't even engaging because it consists of "select the obvious correct option to progress the script", so it's just more mashing through meaningless shit.

      Afterward, you can finally get to Castelia City. This is where you can tell the developers started putting noticeably less effort into the game and its holes as a rehash start to show. The map is almost entirely the same as BW1, and there are NPCs with nonsensically copy/pasted dialogue from BW1. The rest of the game is like this the last two gyms. The north is unsurprisingly roadblocked. The east entrance is also roadblocked for no real reason except to trick people into thinking the game is great for having a padded post-game instead of giving the player any agency (want to start breeding your Pokémon early? Frick you). So the only choice is to go is the new area, the sewer. However, since the game doesn't respect the player's intelligence, there's a worker blocking it until you talk to Iris to specifically lead you there.

      2/?

      Once you get to the Sewer there are more roadblocks and you can't fully explore it until you backtrack without your rival following and constantly healing you.
      After Castelia City and Route 4 there's yet another forced tutorial for the Join Avenue, which is basically just a tool to grind out items (some of which are inferior to other games, such as the Berry Shop, when in Gen 3-4 and 6-7 you can simply farm them for free). The catch is that it requires communicating with other players to fill up. So if you have no one to play with you're SOL and this area is completely useless.
      Nimbasa City and Route 5/16 play pretty much the same as BW1. Both bridges are roadblocked until the game wants you to access them and the forced Pokémon Musical tutorial is replaced with a forced Pokémon Grotto tutorial.

      At Driftveil City there are three (!) roadblocks, one for Clay Tunnel, one for the PWT, and one in Chargestone Cave. So like usual you're forced mash through the order the game forces you to do things.
      The rest of the game progresses the same way. Go through route, reach town, do the one thing the game actually lets you do, rinse and repeat. One hilarious thing that the game changes from BW1 is how you encounter the Swords of Justice. Instead of being hidden away in different areas of the game, they instead just stand there in the middle of routes for the player to easily encounter with zero effort during the story.

      3/?

      Rather than a Battle Frontier like the previous upper versions, they decided to add the Pokémon World Tournament, which is a complete downgrade gameplay wise, deciding to trade the streak based systems of the previous battle facilities with a simple tournament bracket which only requires three wins. This completely trivializes the difficulty to the point where even an unoptimized campaign team can easily clear it and kills the point of even bothering to play it rather than just going to PvP. The main appeal of this mode appears to be the spectacle of seeing all the previous characters magically (and nonsensically) show up in this brand new facility in this remote region. If you like to clap at dangling keys rather than have engaging, challenging gameplay, you might enjoy this.
      An additional battle facility they added was the Black Tower/White Treehollow. This is effectively a clone of the Battle Pyramid from Emerald, except with the key difference that you can use your full campaign team with levels not scaled, and you gain EXP like normal. Meaning, like the rest of the campaign, you can easily sweep through it with your overleveled team like usual, and the difficulty and replayability of it is gutted as a result.

      The rest of the postgame effectively just involves walking through old reused BW1 maps that have new Trainers on them while easily sweeping through them and further overleveling your Pokémon. Nothing about it is engaging and you never have a reason to revisit the maps again since there's no repeatable content.

      4/?

      Outside of the gameplay itself, the rest of the game is poorly polished. The sprites are animated horribly with robotic tweening rather than being redrawn manually by hand,
      resulting in the sprites being broken and distorted every time they move. The back sprites are inconsistently scaled and are zoomed by *2 like Gen 1, making them look horribly pixelated and low resolution compared to the DS's screen.
      The Pokemon are locked in their single idle animation so all the move animations are lazily stapled onto the Pokémon. If you want to see Charizard using Flamethrower out of its shoulder, maybe you'll like the animations.

      The bottom screen is the same as BW1, the C-Gear, which is effectively useless the entire game since it displays no useful information. This is far cry from useful bottom screens that had various tools such as DPPt's Poketch which had various apps, HGSS's bottom screen which allowed you to easily access registered items or run automatically (which was nonsensically removed) or XY's bottom screen which allows you to track your team's stats and see everyone around you online or locally. The game lacks the QoL additions from newer games, such as Destiny Knot breeding, Ability Capsules, Ability Patches, Bottle Caps, and Mints, so training Pokémon for online play is frustrating and tedious.

      The music is decent but they made the stupid choice to replace it with a badly done low HP beeping remix whenever your Pokémon happens to drop to low HP, which completely ruins the atmosphere of the battle.

      If you don't care about a game with well crafted gameplay, and instead want to gawk at all the returning characters and the number of maps the game decided to pointlessly lock to after the credits, then you'll think this game is good.

      cringe

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      Every remotely long area has at least one doctor NPC who will heal your Pokémon completely for free. So actually losing in this game is virtually impossible without handicapping yourself.

      The game has an absurd number of tutorials and roadblocks, such that the campaign involves virtually no gameplay outside of mashing through text and going where NPCs want you to go. The game has no respect for the players intelligence; unlike Gen 1, 2, 8, and 9, the catching tutorial and Pokemon Center tutorials are forced. Dialogue options that seemingly give you the choice to skip explanations give you the explanation anyway even if you select the negative option (e.g. Mr. Medal's explanation on medals). After Virbank Gym you're led around and forced to do a tutorial for a side mode that has virtually nothing to do with the entire rest of the game, and in of itself isn't even engaging because it consists of "select the obvious correct option to progress the script", so it's just more mashing through meaningless shit.

      Afterward, you can finally get to Castelia City. This is where you can tell the developers started putting noticeably less effort into the game and its holes as a rehash start to show. The map is almost entirely the same as BW1, and there are NPCs with nonsensically copy/pasted dialogue from BW1. The rest of the game is like this the last two gyms. The north is unsurprisingly roadblocked. The east entrance is also roadblocked for no real reason except to trick people into thinking the game is great for having a padded post-game instead of giving the player any agency (want to start breeding your Pokémon early? Frick you). So the only choice is to go is the new area, the sewer. However, since the game doesn't respect the player's intelligence, there's a worker blocking it until you talk to Iris to specifically lead you there.

      2/?

      Once you get to the Sewer there are more roadblocks and you can't fully explore it until you backtrack without your rival following and constantly healing you.
      After Castelia City and Route 4 there's yet another forced tutorial for the Join Avenue, which is basically just a tool to grind out items (some of which are inferior to other games, such as the Berry Shop, when in Gen 3-4 and 6-7 you can simply farm them for free). The catch is that it requires communicating with other players to fill up. So if you have no one to play with you're SOL and this area is completely useless.
      Nimbasa City and Route 5/16 play pretty much the same as BW1. Both bridges are roadblocked until the game wants you to access them and the forced Pokémon Musical tutorial is replaced with a forced Pokémon Grotto tutorial.

      At Driftveil City there are three (!) roadblocks, one for Clay Tunnel, one for the PWT, and one in Chargestone Cave. So like usual you're forced mash through the order the game forces you to do things.
      The rest of the game progresses the same way. Go through route, reach town, do the one thing the game actually lets you do, rinse and repeat. One hilarious thing that the game changes from BW1 is how you encounter the Swords of Justice. Instead of being hidden away in different areas of the game, they instead just stand there in the middle of routes for the player to easily encounter with zero effort during the story.

      3/?

      Rather than a Battle Frontier like the previous upper versions, they decided to add the Pokémon World Tournament, which is a complete downgrade gameplay wise, deciding to trade the streak based systems of the previous battle facilities with a simple tournament bracket which only requires three wins. This completely trivializes the difficulty to the point where even an unoptimized campaign team can easily clear it and kills the point of even bothering to play it rather than just going to PvP. The main appeal of this mode appears to be the spectacle of seeing all the previous characters magically (and nonsensically) show up in this brand new facility in this remote region. If you like to clap at dangling keys rather than have engaging, challenging gameplay, you might enjoy this.
      An additional battle facility they added was the Black Tower/White Treehollow. This is effectively a clone of the Battle Pyramid from Emerald, except with the key difference that you can use your full campaign team with levels not scaled, and you gain EXP like normal. Meaning, like the rest of the campaign, you can easily sweep through it with your overleveled team like usual, and the difficulty and replayability of it is gutted as a result.

      The rest of the postgame effectively just involves walking through old reused BW1 maps that have new Trainers on them while easily sweeping through them and further overleveling your Pokémon. Nothing about it is engaging and you never have a reason to revisit the maps again since there's no repeatable content.

      4/?

      Outside of the gameplay itself, the rest of the game is poorly polished. The sprites are animated horribly with robotic tweening rather than being redrawn manually by hand,
      resulting in the sprites being broken and distorted every time they move. The back sprites are inconsistently scaled and are zoomed by *2 like Gen 1, making them look horribly pixelated and low resolution compared to the DS's screen.
      The Pokemon are locked in their single idle animation so all the move animations are lazily stapled onto the Pokémon. If you want to see Charizard using Flamethrower out of its shoulder, maybe you'll like the animations.

      The bottom screen is the same as BW1, the C-Gear, which is effectively useless the entire game since it displays no useful information. This is far cry from useful bottom screens that had various tools such as DPPt's Poketch which had various apps, HGSS's bottom screen which allowed you to easily access registered items or run automatically (which was nonsensically removed) or XY's bottom screen which allows you to track your team's stats and see everyone around you online or locally. The game lacks the QoL additions from newer games, such as Destiny Knot breeding, Ability Capsules, Ability Patches, Bottle Caps, and Mints, so training Pokémon for online play is frustrating and tedious.

      The music is decent but they made the stupid choice to replace it with a badly done low HP beeping remix whenever your Pokémon happens to drop to low HP, which completely ruins the atmosphere of the battle.

      If you don't care about a game with well crafted gameplay, and instead want to gawk at all the returning characters and the number of maps the game decided to pointlessly lock to after the credits, then you'll think this game is good.

      based autism. i guess you're the schizo that made the giant anti-platinum post too?
      stop shitting on my favorite pokemon games

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      Every remotely long area has at least one doctor NPC who will heal your Pokémon completely for free. So actually losing in this game is virtually impossible without handicapping yourself.

      The game has an absurd number of tutorials and roadblocks, such that the campaign involves virtually no gameplay outside of mashing through text and going where NPCs want you to go. The game has no respect for the players intelligence; unlike Gen 1, 2, 8, and 9, the catching tutorial and Pokemon Center tutorials are forced. Dialogue options that seemingly give you the choice to skip explanations give you the explanation anyway even if you select the negative option (e.g. Mr. Medal's explanation on medals). After Virbank Gym you're led around and forced to do a tutorial for a side mode that has virtually nothing to do with the entire rest of the game, and in of itself isn't even engaging because it consists of "select the obvious correct option to progress the script", so it's just more mashing through meaningless shit.

      Afterward, you can finally get to Castelia City. This is where you can tell the developers started putting noticeably less effort into the game and its holes as a rehash start to show. The map is almost entirely the same as BW1, and there are NPCs with nonsensically copy/pasted dialogue from BW1. The rest of the game is like this the last two gyms. The north is unsurprisingly roadblocked. The east entrance is also roadblocked for no real reason except to trick people into thinking the game is great for having a padded post-game instead of giving the player any agency (want to start breeding your Pokémon early? Frick you). So the only choice is to go is the new area, the sewer. However, since the game doesn't respect the player's intelligence, there's a worker blocking it until you talk to Iris to specifically lead you there.

      2/?

      Once you get to the Sewer there are more roadblocks and you can't fully explore it until you backtrack without your rival following and constantly healing you.
      After Castelia City and Route 4 there's yet another forced tutorial for the Join Avenue, which is basically just a tool to grind out items (some of which are inferior to other games, such as the Berry Shop, when in Gen 3-4 and 6-7 you can simply farm them for free). The catch is that it requires communicating with other players to fill up. So if you have no one to play with you're SOL and this area is completely useless.
      Nimbasa City and Route 5/16 play pretty much the same as BW1. Both bridges are roadblocked until the game wants you to access them and the forced Pokémon Musical tutorial is replaced with a forced Pokémon Grotto tutorial.

      At Driftveil City there are three (!) roadblocks, one for Clay Tunnel, one for the PWT, and one in Chargestone Cave. So like usual you're forced mash through the order the game forces you to do things.
      The rest of the game progresses the same way. Go through route, reach town, do the one thing the game actually lets you do, rinse and repeat. One hilarious thing that the game changes from BW1 is how you encounter the Swords of Justice. Instead of being hidden away in different areas of the game, they instead just stand there in the middle of routes for the player to easily encounter with zero effort during the story.

      3/?

      Rather than a Battle Frontier like the previous upper versions, they decided to add the Pokémon World Tournament, which is a complete downgrade gameplay wise, deciding to trade the streak based systems of the previous battle facilities with a simple tournament bracket which only requires three wins. This completely trivializes the difficulty to the point where even an unoptimized campaign team can easily clear it and kills the point of even bothering to play it rather than just going to PvP. The main appeal of this mode appears to be the spectacle of seeing all the previous characters magically (and nonsensically) show up in this brand new facility in this remote region. If you like to clap at dangling keys rather than have engaging, challenging gameplay, you might enjoy this.
      An additional battle facility they added was the Black Tower/White Treehollow. This is effectively a clone of the Battle Pyramid from Emerald, except with the key difference that you can use your full campaign team with levels not scaled, and you gain EXP like normal. Meaning, like the rest of the campaign, you can easily sweep through it with your overleveled team like usual, and the difficulty and replayability of it is gutted as a result.

      The rest of the postgame effectively just involves walking through old reused BW1 maps that have new Trainers on them while easily sweeping through them and further overleveling your Pokémon. Nothing about it is engaging and you never have a reason to revisit the maps again since there's no repeatable content.

      4/?

      Outside of the gameplay itself, the rest of the game is poorly polished. The sprites are animated horribly with robotic tweening rather than being redrawn manually by hand,
      resulting in the sprites being broken and distorted every time they move. The back sprites are inconsistently scaled and are zoomed by *2 like Gen 1, making them look horribly pixelated and low resolution compared to the DS's screen.
      The Pokemon are locked in their single idle animation so all the move animations are lazily stapled onto the Pokémon. If you want to see Charizard using Flamethrower out of its shoulder, maybe you'll like the animations.

      The bottom screen is the same as BW1, the C-Gear, which is effectively useless the entire game since it displays no useful information. This is far cry from useful bottom screens that had various tools such as DPPt's Poketch which had various apps, HGSS's bottom screen which allowed you to easily access registered items or run automatically (which was nonsensically removed) or XY's bottom screen which allows you to track your team's stats and see everyone around you online or locally. The game lacks the QoL additions from newer games, such as Destiny Knot breeding, Ability Capsules, Ability Patches, Bottle Caps, and Mints, so training Pokémon for online play is frustrating and tedious.

      The music is decent but they made the stupid choice to replace it with a badly done low HP beeping remix whenever your Pokémon happens to drop to low HP, which completely ruins the atmosphere of the battle.

      If you don't care about a game with well crafted gameplay, and instead want to gawk at all the returning characters and the number of maps the game decided to pointlessly lock to after the credits, then you'll think this game is good.

      Based thread.

  26. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    Vespiquen

  27. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Overall worse soundtrack than the original. Safari Zone was an unecessary fix to a problem that could have been resolved by simply adding the new pokemon to more Johto routes.
    >BW1
    As much as I loved BW, not having popular older mons is a big no-no. Drizzle/Drought on non-legendary pokemon was a huge mistake. Every rival except N sucked.
    >BW2
    No Battle Frontier. PWT is too easy. Hard mode is actually easier. Hugh is also a shit rival.

    Oh, and one more thing. have a nice day Hoenngay. You think I don't know? It's ALWAYS a Hoenngay starting genwars. Always has, always will.

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >not having popular older mons is a big no-no
      Don't most people make in-game teams consisting of only new Pokémon anyways?

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        Yeah.

        But a lot of normies will skip a gen because of school or work, but pick up the following one because Pokémon is inherantly addicting and ingrained in those who started collecting these shits as kids - And there's inevitably Pokémon restricted to the late-game that become early/mid-game finds in following Gens.

        As such, I've actually found myself in habit of catching at least one older Pokémon per playthrough, that I previously never had the chance to use.

        Stuff like Kommo-o and Golisopod for example. Harder to get in Alola, but relatively easy to come across in Galar or Paldea.

        So when playing a new gen for example my team tends to look like;

        >Starter
        >Early-game Pokémon I take a chance on and usually regret (Shitmon like Nikkit)
        >Mid-game Pokémon, usually one I decided would be "mine" from a trailer, or has an interesting gimmick (Mimikkyu and Grafaiai as examples)
        >Returning Pokémon I never got a chance to try in past game (If I am lucky enough to find a shiny, this usually takes this slot. Happened more than once.)
        >Regional variant of an older Pokémon
        >Late-game Pokémon I pick up to round out my team. Sometimes I'll be cheeky and slip a legendary in here for fun.

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >spoiler
      NAILED IT

  28. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >Say one negative thing about HGSS or Gen 5.
    HGSS were so good that anything that came after those games would never measure up. Gen 5 tried at least.

  29. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Not long enough
    >BW/BW2
    didn't take the opportunity to fix the game's bad balancing

  30. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    nowhere to evolve Glaceon/Leafeon/Magnezone/Probopass

    >Gen 5
    Map too linear, I love that gen but I have to admit that

  31. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    Why couldn't /vp/ be more like this all the time? There shouldn't be threads demanding to get out of your shill mode and criticize shit games.

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >get out of your shill mode
      By specifically only criticising old games, curious.

  32. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    They are both too good, some people might be intimidated and resentful for that.

  33. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    HGSS
    >Lyra is a much worse design than Kris is and she exists as nothing beyond a filler character who handholds you and gives you forced tutorials
    >Forced legendary encounters / "chosen one" story to fall more in line with Gens III and IV is lame and takes away from the special feeling the original legends had
    >Pokeathlon is essentially nothing more than a gimmick so that they could sell the game as making use of the touch screen, nothing there is actually interesting
    >copy and pasting Platinum's Battle Frontier verbatim feels like a lazy move
    >lol Gen IV engine
    Gen V
    >Linearized as frick, if Gen IV made the blueprints for a straight line region then Gen V actually built it
    >Most Unovamons are blatantly meant to be Kantomon stand-ins and the vast majority of them are worse than the originals, limiting the in-game roster to only Unovamons only worsens the problem
    >Also feel like Unova is where Pokemon design quality started to decline, Unova has a lot of good mons (ESPECIALLY Bug-types) but it's the first gen to really start going all in on some really overdesigned shit (mainly legendaries) as well as the first gen to not have a single starter line I like
    >Tweening and mixels are ugly-looking which results in a lot of shitty looking in-battle animations
    >Lots of early-game handholding (FRICK POKESTAR STUDIOS)
    >Hugh sucks as a rival and basically laid the groundwork for a number of the shitty sympathy-bait rivals to come

    They're both still better than every single game to come after

  34. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    black people

  35. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    The early game of BW is a fricking slog.
    The mid-game of HGSS is a fricking slog.

  36. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >Gen 5
    it introduced Black folk to the series

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >gen 5 introduced Black folk
      What is Primeape

  37. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    It felt very repetitive for HGSS to copy and paste the Platinum Battle Frontier
    BW, while nowhere near as weak as the latter entries you could feel that was the turning point of the games, where they started to feel more casualised but luckily retained enough of the older games sensibilities

  38. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    I don't think the level curve itself is a problem but the very low level wild Pokemon is, it makes it very difficult to use lategame mons because of how much of a slog it is to get them up to speed
    >Gen 5
    Route 15 being postgame only in both games is rather dumb especially since its where you find the Earthquake TM
    Also needing to beat the game and connect with another player to get Challenge Mode is incredibly stupid

  39. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >Say one negative thing about Gen 5.
    cmon bro, too easy

  40. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    How is that even proof of someone not being a mindless drone? If anything, being able to say a negative thing about either or both of HGSS or Gen 5 can easily be done by a mindless drone with the appropriate programming.

  41. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    Unova overworld looked nice but the battle sprites look genuinely weird to me, I don’t know when they started to become so highly praised. They aren’t truly animated, most waving their limbs around. Something like Pokémon Ranger animation is much more fluid.

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      The reason is simply a cost-cutting technique. Instead of actually animating 600+ unique sprites, they did this, because they wanted to have some level of constant motion.
      The animations is games before that were better, but they were non-looping animations, essentally.
      And yeah, Ranger looks way better, but it's also not quite the same thing it's an entirely different genre of games even.
      That's not to really defend the sprites of Gen 5, since some of them do look really awkward.

  42. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Lyra is dumb
    >Gen 5
    Haven't played

  43. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >gen 5
    Held your hand like a clingy girlsfriend and had one of the worst pokedexes and meta in the series.

    >HGSS
    Looks shit and doesn't take the opportunity to make any improvements and walks some back. If I wanna play gen 2 I'll play crystal.

  44. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Safari Zone is annoying
    Red still is a huge level spike compared to the rest of Kanto
    >Gen 5
    Relied too much on online services that died in a few years
    The key system in B2W2 sucks ass

    And yet both of these games are better than everything released in Gen 6+ (PLA notwithstanding) combined.

  45. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Nearly all of the interface changes vs. DPPt are awful. The bottom screen focused menu is unintuitive, running shoes toggle feels bad compared to a button, the bag is literally the worst it's ever been.
    >BW
    Unova has an uninspired layout, which has been carried on to every game past it. B2W2 somehow manages to be confusing while still feeling like a shitty straight line.

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >the bag is literally the worst it's ever been.
      You must not have played Scarlet & Violet.

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        True, I haven't. Is it really worse than 30+ pages of 6 items each?

        • 8 months ago
          Anonymous

          Yes, because it's 6 pages of 300 items. They don't even have the decency to split up battle items and vitamins anymore.
          All your EV-related items, held items, rare candies, Arceus plates, evolution items, various battle held items, and tera shards are all in the same pocket. And there's no way to skip in the menu so you just have to scroll and pay good attention.

        • 8 months ago
          Anonymous

          Yes, because it's 6 pages of 300 items. They don't even have the decency to split up battle items and vitamins anymore.
          All your EV-related items, held items, rare candies, Arceus plates, evolution items, various battle held items, and tera shards are all in the same pocket. And there's no way to skip in the menu so you just have to scroll and pay good attention.

          And because I don't feel my first post made it sound bad enough, there's
          >17 arceus plates
          >18 generic boosting items
          >18 types of tera shard
          >6 types of rare/exp candy
          >6 vitamins
          >7 mochi that function identically to vitamins(plus one that resets your EVs)
          >6 EV-boosting feathers
          >20 items to change your natures
          >18+ evolution items
          >6 held items for the sinnoh creation trio(3 that boost stats, 3 that change them into their origin forms)
          >3 masks to transform ogerpon
          And then however many there are of battle held items like choice items, life orb, leftovers, etc.

          • 8 months ago
            Anonymous

            I do hate the bloat of the crystals/mints/sub-candies, but as long as it's a list and I can organize it I don't really care. Not having a quick scroll on left/right sounds like a pain in the ass though.

            • 8 months ago
              Anonymous

              You can't manually reorganize items anymore, you can only mark favorites.

  46. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Same scaling issues as G/S
    >Gen 5
    BW’s “soft reboot” was stupid and most of the replacement-mon are ugly as frick
    Looking at you, timburr linen

  47. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Not enough freedom compared to GSC.
    >Gen 5
    Rotating pixel art looks disgusting.

  48. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    requiring sprout tower
    dreamworld-only berry pots
    >captch:SX000W

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >requiring sprout tower
      I wish i knew what the frick youre trying to say. Are you ESL?

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        HGSS forces you to beat sprout tower before you can challenge falkner, no such requirement in GSC ever existed

  49. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    The levels for grinding shit is atrocious. Unless you're at Victory Road, most things are severely underleveled due to how the game works.

    >Gen 5
    The animated sprites. I'm sorry that people like them, but holy frick they look so bad and crunchy. It FEELS like they have half-pixels and shit. I'd rather have 3D models than whatever the frick gen 5 is going for.

  50. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Im not usually a level curve complainer, but I do wish they were more consistent about altering the levels of trainers from the originals. For example, the trainers on route 44 had their levels raised by about 3 to accommodate that you could no longer explore it before the radio tower, but the trainers on route 45 and 46 had their levels largely untouched, and as a result are actually weaker than the ones on route 44 despite strictly coming after. There’s a few instances of this, where levels feels astoundingly inconsistent even compared to the originals due to the fact that some trainers had level buffs but some didn’t. I unironically prefer the level curve in the originals over the HGSS level curve for this reason, I much prefer consistency over everything else.
    >BW
    The early game is legitimately trash for Pokémon selection and it hurts. I hate that the first gym is basically an elemental monkey check. If you wanna know how to handle pre-gym 1 Pokémon selection look no further than the Hoenn games. THATS how you do it, not this bullshit.
    >BW2
    It’s an obvious one but the pokestar studios tutorial and the PWT tutorial are massive pace breakers. Also, these games don’t deserve the praise they get for having difficulty “options” they were handled poorly beyond belief (deleting your save gets rid of keys so it’s not even a new game + type feature, you literally have to trade it with someone else)

    Do note that I like all these games quite a lot, they’re simply not above criticism

  51. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    because it's gen 4, it was slow as shit.
    >BW
    I can probably count on one hand how many pokemon I actually liked.

  52. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Bad level curve, I want to be able to decorate my bedroom like in crystal 🙁
    >Gen 5
    Didn't take enough of the great extra elements from gen 4, Nate is one of the ugliest protagonists in the series.

  53. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >Say one negative thing about HGSS
    I hate how they handled the safari zone with having to wait over 100 days for some pokemon and getting all the blocks are a pain
    In gen 5 i didnt like how every pokemon evolved at like level 50 or 70

  54. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    constant unavoidable interruptions by Lyra/Ethan
    >Gen 5
    slow start and limited mons in the early game of BW1. pokestar studios in BW2.

  55. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    gen 5 low HP music sucks the tension out of most major fights
    it's fine for random trainers or wild battles but anywhere else it's just annoying
    also the evolution levels for a lot of pokemon are absurdly high which makes sense for unova's level curve but they never got retconned in future gens

  56. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >Whirlpool being a HM

    >obligatory Pokestar tutorial
    >difficulty modes locked to postgame

  57. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    It ends eventually
    >Bw
    Its existence

  58. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    aside from all the flaws it inherited from GSC, there's also the segment with the kimono girls and box legendary, which I find to be nothing but a chore
    >no anon you can't go punch out the elite four or do whatever else you feel like doing now
    >you need to come read our dialogue and wade through an unimpressive dungeon to see the Very Important Pokémon and marvel at how Important it is

    >Gen 5
    the entire fricking game is like the kimono girls segment
    >no anon you can't go have fun on your own
    >you need to read the dialogue from the Very Important Human
    >you need to marvel about how Interesting he is and how Important he is and how Meaningful his dialogue is
    >okay now that you're done with that here's one of your braindead """friends""" to tell you what city you're going to next and which dungeon or route you have to go through to get there
    >also we blocked off all the other exits to make sure you don't wander off and have fun on your own because that'd be awful
    every flaw in XY is also present in BW to some extent

  59. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    less fun than GS, simple as
    >BWB2W2
    not fun at all. on rails jrpg with too many cutscenes in service of a completely uninteresting story

  60. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >gen 5
    team plasma
    a shitty plot i don't care about
    muh yin yang kung fu bullshit
    rival starts becoming a dicksucking homosexual that would only worsen in future games
    awful starters
    some of the dumbest looking shitmons
    a zubat clone nobody wanted
    literal garbage mon

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >rival starts becoming a dicksucking homosexual that would only worsen in future games
      this started in Gen 3, cheren is a bigger actual rival to you than barry btw

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        cheren uses early bird shitmon and the moronic monkey AND hands you free items throughout the game lol. gtfo, he's a dosghit rival

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Rival is not an butthole so it's a dicksucker!
        Pretty moronic opinion, they are nowhere near at gen 6+ level of shit

  61. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    The optional areas of Johto are still quite barren and the game still suffers from having too many Kantomons in the Johto region part of the game
    >Gen 5
    No unique themes for the Legendaries

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >the game still suffers from having too many Kantomons in the Johto region part of the game
      have a nice day

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        It's true, cope. Whenever a new region starts I wanna use mons from said region, not Kanto.

        • 8 months ago
          Anonymous

          T.unabort

  62. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    Being forced to go through Ho-oh or Lugia despite them not really having any tie-in into the current story that would stop me from just doing Gym 8, Kimono girls quest feels tackled in
    In the same respective way I hate that BW2 removed the Sword trio from their caves in BW to shove them right into your path despite them not having much of a correlation to the story either.

  63. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    The phone system was shit.

  64. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    There's still not decent representation of johto 'mons. And gen 5 needed that dream world website to grow berries. Now you can't grow berries in gen 5 anymore.

  65. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    > HGSS
    I don't like much the soundfont, so many remixes feel off and I prefer the original music compositions.
    Plot felt quite boring after Gen3 and 4, they changed some things but played it way too safe.

    >Gen 5
    Cheren and Bianca are overrated as hell and they're the most annoying rivals in the entire franchise. Yes, I found them even more annoying than the XY idiots. You are forced to battle them way too many times throughout your adventure and I hate how the game tries so hard to make the player perceive them as "friends" and "deep" while they are two walking clichés. Even Bianca is not as innovative as they make her out to be, since Wally had similar issues to her (overprotective family) first.
    The plot is wall of texts everywhere, way too much dialogue expecting you to sit through. Unova is geographically boring and being forced to only use Gen5 Pokemon for most of the game was a shitty choice (I much prefer the approach they adopted from Gen6 on for the fauna).
    White Forest/Black City, as well as the entire Internet gimmick of Gen5 were extremely shitty because it relieved too much on Wi-Fi at a time where it wasn't as common.

  66. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    That's a cool map OP, do you have any of the other regions like that?

  67. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    Gen 5 was really good in concept but the overreliance on multiplayer damaged it hard when the DS lost online a few years later.

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      Funnily, XY will soon reach 10 years of online support

  68. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Most of the good Johto mons are in fricking Kanto

    >Gen 5
    Ridiculous level evolution requirements

  69. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    HGSS added a lot more zones but more HM reliance as well. I also genuinely prefer Johto in Gen 2 because it's just a simpler engine for a simpler setting.

    Gen 5 genuinely has a lot of middling Pokemon in its dex. I have a few favorites but despite the large roster I rarely shuffle my team on replays. And the Evo levels are fine for Gen 5 but really annoying for other games.

  70. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    I bet Mario fans are like this with Super Paper Mario.

  71. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >hgss
    the level curve
    >gen 5
    a lot of unova mons take forever to evolve for no reason like Braviary etc. not every one was even at the level of volcarona that needed it.

  72. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >shartygay throwing a tantrum

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      >HG/SS
      GB Sounds doesn't work properly and comes in too late, makes HMs too necessary in late game (why did getting to Red need you to waste space on Rock Climb?).
      >Gen 5
      No Frontier, region layout sucks, while the pixel art is in depth it just doesn't work stylistically compared to Gen 4 imo.
      Now, the question is, shartygays: can you post anything negative about Gens 6-9?

      What’s a “sharty”?

      • 8 months ago
        Anonymous

        Some Ganker ripoff centered around soijaks, whose userbase thinks they're master trolls because they can copy-paste.

  73. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HG/SS
    GB Sounds doesn't work properly and comes in too late, makes HMs too necessary in late game (why did getting to Red need you to waste space on Rock Climb?).
    >Gen 5
    No Frontier, region layout sucks, while the pixel art is in depth it just doesn't work stylistically compared to Gen 4 imo.
    Now, the question is, shartygays: can you post anything negative about Gens 6-9?

  74. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    Black 2 and White 2

  75. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Exp curve, Johto gym leader teams with too few Johto mons
    >BW
    Boring region navigation, starting of the "One step in the new city, and you are stopped by someone" trend

    • 8 months ago
      Anonymous

      Oh, and for BW, start of the decline of Pokemon design

  76. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    Never finished it
    >Gen 5
    Never played it

  77. 8 months ago
    Anonymous

    >HGSS
    RIP gamecorner
    >BW
    Everything

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