This is one of the many reasons why Pokemon was a critical success. The ways that it made easy and hard mode into decisions that you made on the fly was genius.
Except if you choose the easy route, the rest of the game becomes harder because you don't have enough exp/levels. The right choice is both, unfortunately.
I don't remember being able to get overleveled at this point during a nuzlock. Though I might have done one, then did koga then did sabrina or did one, did koga and sabrina and then blane? I remember the rocket fight in sabrina's city getting me close to being overleveled for sabrina
Having freedom in where to go doesn't feel as good as having a ton of cool Pokemon to use, but they are usually linked.
By giving the player more access to more Pokemon that fulfill more diverse gameplay roles more effectively, the drive to seek out a bigger roster by exploring in different directions is reduced.
And in the latest couple games, maybe 10-20% of the game world is gated behind any particular achievement or ability on your part, so the thrill of "ooh, a new area, maybe I can catch something new here, or find a unique item" is at an all time low.
even though diamond and pearl were linear, I'm still amazed by how many hidden areas there are. I had been playing it for about a year before I ever found places like fuego ironworks, granted there's no real point in going there anyway.
>to get a pseudo-legendary in gen 4 you have to find its first stage in a hidden part of an optional side area then raise it for basically the entire game >to get a pseudo-legendary in gen 9 you have to find one wandering around and get lucky with a quick ball
I know I'm in a tiny minority, but I actually preferred random encounters, at least when it comes to pokemon games, because the entire point is to scour the world for any new pokemon you can find. If they're all just there in the overworld, right in front of you, it kinda makes it trivial to catch what you want. You don't have to work for it at all.
I think if Game Freak was willing to put in a modicum of work, overworld encounters could work for hunting new Pokemon. You just have to make more specific locations and circumstances these Pokemon will spawn under, and make it an actual challenge to achieve some of those conditions or reach some of those locations.
But we all know Game Freak is unwilling to put in even an ounce of work, so we'll never have a species of Pokemon that requires actual effort to hunt down again.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, I was gonna mention something like that, but I didn't bother because I know it's a pipedream. But yeah, I'd love for the pokemon to actually fit in their environment in a way that makes sense. I've never played Snap, but apparently to catch Slowbro, you have to lure a slowpoke to the river to get bitten by a shelder. A world full of those cool interactions would be amazing. Or like how pokedex entries mention that pidgeys feed on caterpie, so if you find a caterpie, you know there's probably a pidgey nearby. Just hopeless dreams.
>gen 1 locks it behind the game corner, you get it as a baby, it's on the slow EXP gain group, learns jackshit for moves (slapping purchasable TMs fixes it though) and gets its final form at level 55 >gen 2 gives it to you on fricking mt silver and it also starts as a baby, but it has a decent moveset and stats >gen 3 pulls the same shit except you have to backtrack to an irrelevant city, go through an optional path inside a low level dungeon, reach an specific place and hope you catch one, but his moveset is complete dogshit (no physical STAB lmao) so you basically have to breed it ASAP with a kingdra that knows dragon dance and hydro pump >in gen 5 it isn't even worth catching because the pseudo-pseudo axew can be caught way earlier and rapes every single gym >in gen 6 it's both ugly and weak, so of course this is the only other game (the other is sinnoh) where you can catch it early and have it level up alongside your starter
I played SM but i didn't even bother to look up where the pseudo spawned.
Jangmo-o appears in Vast Poni Canyon (aka not-victory road, considering this game's Victory Road fricking sucks), so it appears near the end of the main game. Now Dreepy, I don't remember where the frick it spawns
Frigibax is a bit cool, sure, you can get it whenever you want, but it spawns exclusively in some hidden caves in the icy mountains, so it's a bit more hidden than most pokemon in the game
8 months ago
Anonymous
>aka not-victory road, considering this game's Victory Road fricking sucks
That's absolutely on purpose. They give you the REAL victory road in the form of an island trial that's at risk of being dropped from the circuit for lack of anyone to run it, then show you the Pokemon League's "official" victory road is this piddly little strip of icy terrain. It's a really strong playable metaphor for the things that fall through the cracks when global culture tries to override local culture.
8 months ago
Anonymous
That's still better than what every other game does, which is locking the pseudo behind the last gym/route. I don't like the ice dragon though, first two stages are horrendous and the last one looks like an unfinished aggron.
8 months ago
Anonymous
the ice dragon just looks like homer simpson to me
8 months ago
Anonymous
Wow, Pokemon names sound like absolute moron gibberish if you can't visualize what they are.
>to get a pseudo in gen 1 you need to buy it or get it in the safari zone >to get a pseudo in gen 2 you need to get it after the 8th gym or on the path leading to the final boss fight of the entire game
muh special snowflake pokemon made everything worse. Gen 2 is pretty cool because that is one of the games that actually makes you use shitters for most of the game. I guess gen 1 does too if you don't know about the early nidoking, how to switch train the magikarp and find the eevee
The game forcing you to use shitters is a nice idea to give them time in the sun (for people other than moronic kids who just use what they like)
I just don't like that you're stuck with almost exclusively shitters at low levels for the time when the game first opens itself up.
in gen 1 you are stuck with shitters for the early game, unless you go catch the nido or buy the karp. I don't think you get access to nonshitters other than those to until you get eevee
Isn't Abra available fairly early on?
You're not getting a Kazam in SP, but a Kadabra is plenty broken in the gen 1 system.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Isn't Abra available fairly early on?
yeah, I forgot Abra. Abra is the 4th goodmon (starter, nido, karp, abra) you can get before the game opens up and you can get eevee and the ghosts and snorelax. But getting Abra is hard for a kid
8 months ago
Anonymous
Clefable is really good too, they're just rare. I wouldn't consider gyarados good I'm gen 1. Its movepool sucks and its STAB is all special moves. It doesn't even learn a flying move as I recall.
8 months ago
Anonymous
the special split didn't happen in gen 1 yet. So gyarados has 100 special attack, great movepool and a 125 physical attack and early evolution at just level 20. Its gen 2 you are thinking of where it is nerfed. In gen 1 it is still good because things like hyperbeam and surf
Butterfree and mankey are alright, the nidos need too much investment to shine (moon stone plus pretty much every single good TM you have).
8 months ago
Anonymous
>the nidos need too much investment to shine
the opposite of this. The Nidos are busted because you can get a 3rd evolution before the 2nd gym and they will straight up learn any TM you don't have a better user for.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>because you can get a 3rd evolution before the 2nd gym
Only if you don't want them to get Level up moves. Stone evolutions were often gimped as a balancing technique, often only get their Level 1 moves and maybe a handful of others and the Nido's were no exception with only Body Slam and (kind of) Thrash being of note at that point.
You won't have most of the good TMs/HMs early on so they're stuck with basically nothing worthwhile to keep long term and prior to Yellow in particular since they didn't even get Double Kick until the 40's (and if you slapped the Moon Stone on it then you would NEVER get it).
What are you going to do? Teach Nidoking Water Gun for Misty? What a good use of TMs.
8 months ago
Anonymous
watergun nidoking fricks up the early game. he can also get >mega punch (which is an unlimited tm) >horn drill (which is an unlimited tm) >takedown (which is an unlimited tm) >double-edge >hyper beam (which is an unlimited tm) >mega kick (which is an unlimited tm) >submission (which is an unlimited tm) >Seismic Toss >fireblast >skullbash >rockslide >strength >surf
he is very good early game due to being a 3rd evolution early and can usually fill a niche late game with horn drill x accuracy, surf, strength/hyperbeam and whatever tm you have left over
So long as the Pokemon available stay good and represent a decent variety, I don't actually see any problem with railroading. What you have on your team has always been way more personal and expressive than the order you chose to go to a few cities.
Now gift Pokemon on the other hand, those always feel a bit against the spirit of things to me. A handful of trades and mysterious NPC-originating eggs is one thing, but flat out receiving two starters and Lucario in XY was a bridge too far.
RBY and GS feel like something a kid might do. If you take the interpretation of kanto being as far as satoshi could ride his bike when he was a kid and the vast majority of adults literally just shitposting to make the kids happy (the fishermen straight up just use the fish they just caught) Red and Blue could easily be the adventure a child had for 2 days during the summer.
The later games get too anime
That's a fair interpretation, but I feel that it's a bit overly forgiving at the same time. GF could easily reconcile the feeling of being a kid running around in a larger world with the gravitas of Pokemon being a more serious thing if they put their backs into it. The FEELING that a broader world existed beyond the bounds of what the game showed you was something that died long after the era of the games actually being a smaller-scale adventure.
makes it so that all those areas that are accessible around the same time have to be around the same difficulty
so koga, sabrina, and blaine's pokemon are all about the same level, despite the fact that they make up a large portion of the second half of the game (you can also do erica's gym at this point but her pokemon are significantly lower level)
While you can argue about filesize limitations in Gen 1 and 2, there is literally no reason past that, that they couldn't set flags with every badge to boost the levels of trainers and wild Pokémon.
Literally every Gen 3+ game already has at least trainer level flags they could've easily made fuller use of.
I should also add, they could've easily made it toggleable as well. Just stick a badge case in the player character's bedroom where you can leave badges to turn off the flag.
I was sure they would do this with SV considering the nonlinear progression. They still didn't. I think the last gym I beat was the grass gym, which is the second one. At that point my Gyarados was at level 100 and nothing else was challenging in the slightest.
Level scaling would've been dumb in SV. Going off the beaten path and actually facing tough challenges is what made the game memorable for me. >having a level 100 pokemon before the post game
That's a you problem, you must have grinded like crazy
nta, you can do something in between - levels are never scaled down to you (you can still fight lv60 enemies in your 20s), but can be scaled up to you, especially gym challenges.
Or put it as a toggleable option.
But we know gamefreak never does difficulty options anymore.
Gen 2 takes this to a logical extreme by giving you access to 3 gyms at once as well as a major rocket encounter, but it also has a weaker selection of Pokemon available beforehand, and spans from the late 20s to the late 30s as far as level, rather than the mid 30s to the late 40s.
you need to beat Koga to get to blaine because you need surf. I don't remember if you need to know strength to get the surf HM. You can get to blaine using an unintended route via pallet town without strength
Unova was linear as frick, but it had some cool optional side paths with more exploration that people give it credit for >Mistralton Cave >Moor of Icirrus >that one cave that had an underleveled Volcarona in B2W2 >desert resort in B2W2, because it was mandatory in BW iirc. Even then, an extra area opens up in the post game >a huge chunk of Castelia is completely optional in B2W2
RBY have very little plot and only really have freedom of movement in a small part of the game between when you leave cerulean and before cinnabar and even then you really need to try to intentionally sequence break if you want to frick around, but the game generally expects you to do the towns/gyms in a certain order with just the 2 snorelax routes and the mash vs soul badges your decision
In GS there was a level curve issue caused by the branching path. everything from C onwards has been too story driven to allow freedom of choice
A change in leadership. Tajiri reslly valued freedom, stating that one of his inspirations was seeing how far he could make it in a bike when he was a teen. Once Masuda took over, the direction gradually turned into a more story heavy one. RSE still had some of that opennes, but BW and XY really crystallized that vision and kept it going further, with Ohmori doubling down on it, stripping away the limited freedom BW still had.
SV completely embraced freedom though, for better or worse. I've been a doomer since gen vi, but I'm actually bit hopeful for the next generation. Despite it's shortcomings, SV took some steps in the right directions, and the facts that the devs have actually addressed the constricting dev cycles, make me think gen x might actually be good again
If you consider "freedom" in terms of being allowed to go wherever to be the lynchpin of what makes Pokemon good and think gen 9 is an improvement, then I'm sure gen 10 will be right up your alley.
Pokemon's strength was being a big RPG crammed into the game boy, so invalidating RPG elements like a world that is inherently a challenge to explore, unfolding more as you gain access to more tools and train your Pokemon stronger, is against the spirit of things.
Go down cycling road, skipping as many trainers as possible.
Now beat Koga and get the surf HM.
At this point pretty much every pokemon is available to you, so go finish your team and then go back through each route and level them up.
gen 1 had close to a decade of dev time and gen 2 was largely an expansion to gen 1. By the time gen 3 came about and the retcon happened the thing was now a product for children and not something made by a group of passionate autists
Possibly, it does a decent job of funneling you back to Cerulean though. Your only two places to end up are by Snorlax and through the Diglett tunnel. I do recall that I didn't have Flash my first time going through Rock Tunnel, that's a memorable trip.
>I do recall that I didn't have Flash my first time going through Rock Tunnel, that's a memorable trip.
I still have the place memorized from so many Flash-less excursions.
starting up pokemon emerald
Cycling Road is Easy Mode.
The docks are Hard Mode.
This is one of the many reasons why Pokemon was a critical success. The ways that it made easy and hard mode into decisions that you made on the fly was genius.
Except if you choose the easy route, the rest of the game becomes harder because you don't have enough exp/levels. The right choice is both, unfortunately.
unless you're just using 1 or 2 mons and they're overleveled already, which you prob are
clearing both routes so you're overleveled
I don't remember being able to get overleveled at this point during a nuzlock. Though I might have done one, then did koga then did sabrina or did one, did koga and sabrina and then blane? I remember the rocket fight in sabrina's city getting me close to being overleveled for sabrina
you don't get "overleveled" in a regular nuzlocke. the rules say you can't level up higher than the next gym's ace pokemon.
i dont like cycling road because bikes are gay
Definitely the boardwalk, it's the best route in the game.
Why don't later games use this kind of nonlinear design more often?
kids cant handle the anxiety
Having freedom in where to go doesn't feel as good as having a ton of cool Pokemon to use, but they are usually linked.
By giving the player more access to more Pokemon that fulfill more diverse gameplay roles more effectively, the drive to seek out a bigger roster by exploring in different directions is reduced.
And in the latest couple games, maybe 10-20% of the game world is gated behind any particular achievement or ability on your part, so the thrill of "ooh, a new area, maybe I can catch something new here, or find a unique item" is at an all time low.
even though diamond and pearl were linear, I'm still amazed by how many hidden areas there are. I had been playing it for about a year before I ever found places like fuego ironworks, granted there's no real point in going there anyway.
>to get a pseudo-legendary in gen 4 you have to find its first stage in a hidden part of an optional side area then raise it for basically the entire game
>to get a pseudo-legendary in gen 9 you have to find one wandering around and get lucky with a quick ball
I know I'm in a tiny minority, but I actually preferred random encounters, at least when it comes to pokemon games, because the entire point is to scour the world for any new pokemon you can find. If they're all just there in the overworld, right in front of you, it kinda makes it trivial to catch what you want. You don't have to work for it at all.
I think if Game Freak was willing to put in a modicum of work, overworld encounters could work for hunting new Pokemon. You just have to make more specific locations and circumstances these Pokemon will spawn under, and make it an actual challenge to achieve some of those conditions or reach some of those locations.
But we all know Game Freak is unwilling to put in even an ounce of work, so we'll never have a species of Pokemon that requires actual effort to hunt down again.
Yeah, I was gonna mention something like that, but I didn't bother because I know it's a pipedream. But yeah, I'd love for the pokemon to actually fit in their environment in a way that makes sense. I've never played Snap, but apparently to catch Slowbro, you have to lure a slowpoke to the river to get bitten by a shelder. A world full of those cool interactions would be amazing. Or like how pokedex entries mention that pidgeys feed on caterpie, so if you find a caterpie, you know there's probably a pidgey nearby. Just hopeless dreams.
>gen 1 locks it behind the game corner, you get it as a baby, it's on the slow EXP gain group, learns jackshit for moves (slapping purchasable TMs fixes it though) and gets its final form at level 55
>gen 2 gives it to you on fricking mt silver and it also starts as a baby, but it has a decent moveset and stats
>gen 3 pulls the same shit except you have to backtrack to an irrelevant city, go through an optional path inside a low level dungeon, reach an specific place and hope you catch one, but his moveset is complete dogshit (no physical STAB lmao) so you basically have to breed it ASAP with a kingdra that knows dragon dance and hydro pump
>in gen 5 it isn't even worth catching because the pseudo-pseudo axew can be caught way earlier and rapes every single gym
>in gen 6 it's both ugly and weak, so of course this is the only other game (the other is sinnoh) where you can catch it early and have it level up alongside your starter
I played SM but i didn't even bother to look up where the pseudo spawned.
What's the gen 6 pseudo?
I used flower mon instead, since fairy is OP, it feels like a pseudo
Goodra, goomy and sliggoo are cute but the final form is something that only a furgay could appreciate.
Jangmo-o appears in Vast Poni Canyon (aka not-victory road, considering this game's Victory Road fricking sucks), so it appears near the end of the main game. Now Dreepy, I don't remember where the frick it spawns
Frigibax is a bit cool, sure, you can get it whenever you want, but it spawns exclusively in some hidden caves in the icy mountains, so it's a bit more hidden than most pokemon in the game
>aka not-victory road, considering this game's Victory Road fricking sucks
That's absolutely on purpose. They give you the REAL victory road in the form of an island trial that's at risk of being dropped from the circuit for lack of anyone to run it, then show you the Pokemon League's "official" victory road is this piddly little strip of icy terrain. It's a really strong playable metaphor for the things that fall through the cracks when global culture tries to override local culture.
That's still better than what every other game does, which is locking the pseudo behind the last gym/route. I don't like the ice dragon though, first two stages are horrendous and the last one looks like an unfinished aggron.
the ice dragon just looks like homer simpson to me
Wow, Pokemon names sound like absolute moron gibberish if you can't visualize what they are.
You can fish dratini in the safari zone in addition to buying one from game corner
Being able to use Gible around Gym 4 and not having to powerlevel a Lv30 shitter at Gym 8 is a godsend.
>to get a pseudo in gen 1 you need to buy it or get it in the safari zone
>to get a pseudo in gen 2 you need to get it after the 8th gym or on the path leading to the final boss fight of the entire game
muh special snowflake pokemon made everything worse. Gen 2 is pretty cool because that is one of the games that actually makes you use shitters for most of the game. I guess gen 1 does too if you don't know about the early nidoking, how to switch train the magikarp and find the eevee
The game forcing you to use shitters is a nice idea to give them time in the sun (for people other than moronic kids who just use what they like)
I just don't like that you're stuck with almost exclusively shitters at low levels for the time when the game first opens itself up.
in gen 1 you are stuck with shitters for the early game, unless you go catch the nido or buy the karp. I don't think you get access to nonshitters other than those to until you get eevee
Isn't Abra available fairly early on?
You're not getting a Kazam in SP, but a Kadabra is plenty broken in the gen 1 system.
>Isn't Abra available fairly early on?
yeah, I forgot Abra. Abra is the 4th goodmon (starter, nido, karp, abra) you can get before the game opens up and you can get eevee and the ghosts and snorelax. But getting Abra is hard for a kid
Clefable is really good too, they're just rare. I wouldn't consider gyarados good I'm gen 1. Its movepool sucks and its STAB is all special moves. It doesn't even learn a flying move as I recall.
the special split didn't happen in gen 1 yet. So gyarados has 100 special attack, great movepool and a 125 physical attack and early evolution at just level 20. Its gen 2 you are thinking of where it is nerfed. In gen 1 it is still good because things like hyperbeam and surf
Butterfree and mankey are alright, the nidos need too much investment to shine (moon stone plus pretty much every single good TM you have).
>the nidos need too much investment to shine
the opposite of this. The Nidos are busted because you can get a 3rd evolution before the 2nd gym and they will straight up learn any TM you don't have a better user for.
>because you can get a 3rd evolution before the 2nd gym
Only if you don't want them to get Level up moves. Stone evolutions were often gimped as a balancing technique, often only get their Level 1 moves and maybe a handful of others and the Nido's were no exception with only Body Slam and (kind of) Thrash being of note at that point.
You won't have most of the good TMs/HMs early on so they're stuck with basically nothing worthwhile to keep long term and prior to Yellow in particular since they didn't even get Double Kick until the 40's (and if you slapped the Moon Stone on it then you would NEVER get it).
What are you going to do? Teach Nidoking Water Gun for Misty? What a good use of TMs.
watergun nidoking fricks up the early game. he can also get
>mega punch (which is an unlimited tm)
>horn drill (which is an unlimited tm)
>takedown (which is an unlimited tm)
>double-edge
>hyper beam (which is an unlimited tm)
>mega kick (which is an unlimited tm)
>submission (which is an unlimited tm)
>Seismic Toss
>fireblast
>skullbash
>rockslide
>strength
>surf
he is very good early game due to being a 3rd evolution early and can usually fill a niche late game with horn drill x accuracy, surf, strength/hyperbeam and whatever tm you have left over
Cant you get bellsprout early? he's pretty good. Also Persian beats ass in gen 1
they realized they were shit devs and decided to blame kids for their own lack of imagination/capabilities.
Masuda is a storygay. The moment he took over in Crystal he added more linear story shit in Eusine/Suicune/Ho-oh.
Then he bequeathed his position to Ohmori in Gen 7 who is a story AND waifugay.
Probably because they got more plot heavy and they needed to railroad you through the game so events happen in order where the player will be.
So long as the Pokemon available stay good and represent a decent variety, I don't actually see any problem with railroading. What you have on your team has always been way more personal and expressive than the order you chose to go to a few cities.
Now gift Pokemon on the other hand, those always feel a bit against the spirit of things to me. A handful of trades and mysterious NPC-originating eggs is one thing, but flat out receiving two starters and Lucario in XY was a bridge too far.
You get a free Eevee and Lapras in RBY
RBY and GS feel like something a kid might do. If you take the interpretation of kanto being as far as satoshi could ride his bike when he was a kid and the vast majority of adults literally just shitposting to make the kids happy (the fishermen straight up just use the fish they just caught) Red and Blue could easily be the adventure a child had for 2 days during the summer.
The later games get too anime
That's a fair interpretation, but I feel that it's a bit overly forgiving at the same time. GF could easily reconcile the feeling of being a kid running around in a larger world with the gravitas of Pokemon being a more serious thing if they put their backs into it. The FEELING that a broader world existed beyond the bounds of what the game showed you was something that died long after the era of the games actually being a smaller-scale adventure.
makes it so that all those areas that are accessible around the same time have to be around the same difficulty
so koga, sabrina, and blaine's pokemon are all about the same level, despite the fact that they make up a large portion of the second half of the game (you can also do erica's gym at this point but her pokemon are significantly lower level)
No it doesn't, that's just their laziness.
While you can argue about filesize limitations in Gen 1 and 2, there is literally no reason past that, that they couldn't set flags with every badge to boost the levels of trainers and wild Pokémon.
Literally every Gen 3+ game already has at least trainer level flags they could've easily made fuller use of.
I should also add, they could've easily made it toggleable as well. Just stick a badge case in the player character's bedroom where you can leave badges to turn off the flag.
I was sure they would do this with SV considering the nonlinear progression. They still didn't. I think the last gym I beat was the grass gym, which is the second one. At that point my Gyarados was at level 100 and nothing else was challenging in the slightest.
Level scaling would've been dumb in SV. Going off the beaten path and actually facing tough challenges is what made the game memorable for me.
>having a level 100 pokemon before the post game
That's a you problem, you must have grinded like crazy
nta, you can do something in between - levels are never scaled down to you (you can still fight lv60 enemies in your 20s), but can be scaled up to you, especially gym challenges.
Or put it as a toggleable option.
But we know gamefreak never does difficulty options anymore.
Gen 2 takes this to a logical extreme by giving you access to 3 gyms at once as well as a major rocket encounter, but it also has a weaker selection of Pokemon available beforehand, and spans from the late 20s to the late 30s as far as level, rather than the mid 30s to the late 40s.
you need to beat Koga to get to blaine because you need surf. I don't remember if you need to know strength to get the surf HM. You can get to blaine using an unintended route via pallet town without strength
>beat late gym
>be overleveled after grinding to beat it
>half the game becomes a chore
It's not good
Man this reminds me, the Unova map sucked donkey dick, and that map was used twice
BW2's additions to the map were excellent but it sucked having BW's region attached. Really unfortunate.
>tons of amazing side areas
>main routes are just a fricking circle
Criminal.
Unova was linear as frick, but it had some cool optional side paths with more exploration that people give it credit for
>Mistralton Cave
>Moor of Icirrus
>that one cave that had an underleveled Volcarona in B2W2
>desert resort in B2W2, because it was mandatory in BW iirc. Even then, an extra area opens up in the post game
>a huge chunk of Castelia is completely optional in B2W2
>mfw my house is literally on that map and I never played a pokemon game past gold
Because
>Googles which way is better
sv did
RBY have very little plot and only really have freedom of movement in a small part of the game between when you leave cerulean and before cinnabar and even then you really need to try to intentionally sequence break if you want to frick around, but the game generally expects you to do the towns/gyms in a certain order with just the 2 snorelax routes and the mash vs soul badges your decision
In GS there was a level curve issue caused by the branching path. everything from C onwards has been too story driven to allow freedom of choice
A change in leadership. Tajiri reslly valued freedom, stating that one of his inspirations was seeing how far he could make it in a bike when he was a teen. Once Masuda took over, the direction gradually turned into a more story heavy one. RSE still had some of that opennes, but BW and XY really crystallized that vision and kept it going further, with Ohmori doubling down on it, stripping away the limited freedom BW still had.
SV completely embraced freedom though, for better or worse. I've been a doomer since gen vi, but I'm actually bit hopeful for the next generation. Despite it's shortcomings, SV took some steps in the right directions, and the facts that the devs have actually addressed the constricting dev cycles, make me think gen x might actually be good again
If you consider "freedom" in terms of being allowed to go wherever to be the lynchpin of what makes Pokemon good and think gen 9 is an improvement, then I'm sure gen 10 will be right up your alley.
Pokemon's strength was being a big RPG crammed into the game boy, so invalidating RPG elements like a world that is inherently a challenge to explore, unfolding more as you gain access to more tools and train your Pokemon stronger, is against the spirit of things.
You might miss the well crafted story. We got a friendly rival with family issues, don't you want to see them grow?
Nice joke
They can't write
They did in gen 2, 3 and 4
the one with the most trainers to fight
Go down cycling road, skipping as many trainers as possible.
Now beat Koga and get the surf HM.
At this point pretty much every pokemon is available to you, so go finish your team and then go back through each route and level them up.
Cycling Road then going down around Fuchsia and back up to the one on Silent Bridge.
Bike route is west
other encounter is east
Bottom pic is the right way
Why are gen 1 and gen 2 so much better than the rest of the franchise?
gen 1 had close to a decade of dev time and gen 2 was largely an expansion to gen 1. By the time gen 3 came about and the retcon happened the thing was now a product for children and not something made by a group of passionate autists
Snorlaxes be sleepin
I always go down the fisher route for more exp. I'm rarely in any rush to reach Fuschia.
Cycling Road has cooler trainers and pokemon. The other route leads to the worst area in the game and a bunch of losers with Flying types.
After beating Surge I always got REALLY confused and had no fricking idea where to go. Was that a normal experience for kids?
Possibly, it does a decent job of funneling you back to Cerulean though. Your only two places to end up are by Snorlax and through the Diglett tunnel. I do recall that I didn't have Flash my first time going through Rock Tunnel, that's a memorable trip.
>I do recall that I didn't have Flash my first time going through Rock Tunnel, that's a memorable trip.
I still have the place memorized from so many Flash-less excursions.
probably. I think you really can only get to the digglet area at that point of the game. which puts you back at the start of the game.
There is no right way.
You get both Snorlax and rape the rest of the game with them.