Why has the Pokemon killers (like temtem) always failed? Is it because Gamefreak is actually competent?
Why has the Pokemon killers (like temtem) always failed? Is it because Gamefreak is actually competent?
Why has the Pokemon killers (like temtem) always failed? Is it because Gamefreak is actually competent?
>less types and therefore much less variety
>feels more like rock paper scissors gameplay
In the case of TemTem they actually 12 types, but the game was absolutely shit.
Maybe because temtem designs are complete garbage
They bought the platypus design and now it's forever stuck in limbo forever.
because every "pokemon killer" sticks too close to the pokemon formula, they wear their inspirations on their sleeves and are too scared to try something new. Even temtem has gyms. So at the end of the day, they're just average pokemon games but without any of the brand recognition and as such no reason to play them over an actual pokemon game
Not enough focus on the adventure. They're usually trying to cash in or are made by competitive autists focusing on the combat
No, it's the stupid blind brand loyalty that made 90's kids think Digimon was just a "rip-off" of Pokemon. The reality of it is that many of these games are actually good, such as Digimon itself, Coromon and of course, the entire Megami Tensei/Persona series which in of itself pre-dates Pokemon anyway.
Black person digimon predates pokemon
they came out back to back from each other. too quick to call either a major rip off. Digimon is first and foremost a tamogatchi, monster raising second. It was aimed at an entirely different market because it was made with the intent of being tamogatchi for boys. The fact that it had a similar name was what really sparked the rivalry between the two franchises. Pretty much digimon technically can't even be classified as a pokemon killer.
Tell that to the people who market Digimon. The franchise celebrated its 20th anniversary a year after Pokemon celebrated its own.
>The reality of it is that many of these games are actually good, such as Digimon itself
I love digimon but the games are garbage lets not kid ourselves. Digimon survive is the first decent looking digimon game.
Hacker's Memory was pretty decent tbh. And while World 1/Next Order are badly designed as GAMES, they nailed a comfy feeling that Pokemon has been trying to grab at for its entire run
The cyber slueth games' writing makes pokemon's writing and plots amazing by comparison. But when you don't care to spend the money on a good localization or at least bother to look for a non "woke" localization team, then you get what you deserve.
Also the battle system in digimon with the type triangle has always been moronic, at least in survive it will feel more like the fire emblem weapon triangle and you can play around it slightly.
Pokémon is a huge franchise. It's not only vidya, but everything revolving it as well: Anime, movies, cards, spin offs, collabs with McD and whatnot, other merch. Also Pokémon has nostalgia going for it. It's ingrained in everyone's brain at this point and nothing can tip it over, no matter how good any "Pokémon killer" game is.
>Gamefreak WAS actually competent
Fixed that for you
Nothing is a "Pokemon killer." Stop using that moronic journo buzzword.
guy here with an actual answer.
1). and probably the biggest one. it's near impossible to make your monsters as iconic as what pokemon are now. literally, and i mean LITERALLY everyone knows what a pokemon is. some hood as black motherfricker who's killed at least 30 bloods can name you 5 fricking pokemon. That's strong.
2). they obvious "look" like pokemon gameplay wise, but they always decide to change at least 2 things about the gameplay and it fricks it up ALWAYS. changes the types, changes the way moves work, changes how many are on a team, changes whatever. it always sucks and it's never fun and they are changing shit just to change. Pokemon has a formula that works for very obvious reasons at this point, it's literally why gamefreak hasn't fricking changed it (also because they know they couldn't make anything better and are lazy)
3). Lore. I know this might seem like a stupid one but you have no idea just how much a pokeball actually means to you. I cannot stand catching monsters with a fricking disk you throw, or a cube, suck them up into a watch or some shit, or a magic crystal. None of it works. News flash, YOU CAN USE A BALL STILL ASS WIPE DEVELOPERS, just don't be an idiot and make it a pokeball. besides the pokeball, it's the very general and plain story that works about a little kid going around exploring under the regions professors with their starter. And also how pokemon (not all i know i've played all the games ;)) are based on animals and feel like they fit into the world. There are always going to be shitmons i just simply cannot stand, but some magic is over at gamefreak where somehow they still make them fit no matter what into the world. besides absolute cancer like zeorora or however you spell that shits name. fricking disgusting.
last but not least
4). MUSIC. No one ever understands just how powerful music is. it can literally make or break things. it's a subconscious powerhouse and brainlets can't understand. just know music is 100% magic.
Schizophrenic babble.
>that grammar
sadly puppet dance is a doujin and already done (kinda, considering the fan patch) because it check the music and mecanics (main gripe is focaslens never implemented doubles) also the exploration part outdone almost al main games
>GF
more like TPC is the one that maintain the boat afloat, also global rule
Temtem though that adding fertility as a stat was a good idea. It's frankly baffling that made it past the idea stage.
nothing is going to surparss the original 151 pokemon
>the original 150 pokemon
Fixed it for ya
Yokai Watch actually made a dent
And a big on at that during the 3ds era
they monster designs always look generic and low quality
the developers and artists they work with seem to be just game obsessed nerds rather than people with actual creative vision
> Trying to dickride Pokemon's popularity
> Copying ideas, mechanics and game loop of Pokemon
> Worse aesthetics
> Either le quirky writting (Nexomon Extinction) or shitty politics (Temtems)
> No multibillion company pumping money into game, promotional stuff and side shits.
Pokemon is too big and ingrain into subculture for anything to even match.
This, Even digimon, A successful franchise in it's own right. doesn't even come close. And even in that case digimon doesn't even directly compete with pokemon considering it's mainly a tamagatchi
Even if you wrote something better than pokemon, nostalgia will win in the end.
I don't know how many of you in this thread were actually around during the 90s Pokemania but a lot of other monster catching games were fighting for second place AND pretty recognizable to most kids. There definitely could have been a timeline where Pokémon failed and this became a Monster Rancher board or whatever. Back in 2000 when I was still in Middle School and every normie kid was discovering anime and jrpgs for the first time, you could easily ask any kid at school to name a Digimon or whip out their copy of DQ Monsters. Even games like Metal Walker and Robopon did pretty well, most kids networks were playing some sort of monster/card collecting anime, and even Nintendo themselves had at least two or three other IPs about collecting monsters. But I think Pokemon outlasted them all and at this point has hit critical mass where it's just too big to fail and it's very hard to take them down or even get a piece of that pie. It out lasted everybody, and now it's just sitting at the top of the heap w no incentive to change
Creating 500+ characters (no matter how shitty) and giving them stats and moves that would make combat not too broken in the span of less than a decade is extremely hard.
Pokémon wins simply because it's there the longest.
All the best Monster Raising games play nothing like Pokemon. If you want actual quality you have to dig deeper and not play a literal pokemon reskin like Pokemon. My personal recommendations.
Monster Sanctuary
https://store.steampowered.com/app/814370/Monster_Sanctuary/
Monster Crown
https://store.steampowered.com/app/830370/Monster_Crown/
Disc Creatures
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1083190/Disc_Creatures/
Monster Hunter Stories 2
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1277400/Monster_Hunter_Stories_2_Wings_of_Ruin/
Monster Rancher (You can't go wrong with any game in this series, if you want to emulate 3, 4, or EVO, I recommend it)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1716120/Monster_Rancher_1__2_DX/
Jade Cocoon
This one hasn't been re-released so you'll need to emulate.
Shoutouts to Nexomon Extinction. It is actually sort of a Pokemon Clone with weak gameplay but it's carried by actually having fun and interesting characters with engaging cutscenes and a world that's fun and rewarding to explore. Basically everything about this game is good BESIDES the weaksauce ripoff pokemon gameplay. Yet, I still played it to completion and had fun with it. This is an example of how Pokemon could actually have dialogue and characters that aren't made for babies and so grating/boring you just want to mash A until they shut the frick up and go away.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1196630/Nexomon_Extinction/
In my opinion, Disc Creatures and Monster Sanctuary are the cream of the cop in this genre, followed very closely by Monster Crown. I consider myself to be pretty well versed in the Monster Taming genre and I intentionally left out Coromon and Temtem for being mediocre Pokemon clones. If you're going to make a Monster Taming game, do not just make a Pokemon reskin. It will never be as good as just playing a good romhack.
Temtem is legit higher quality than most of these games and is not a bad game imo but as somebody that enjoys comp Pokemon the grinding and length of the campaign and lack of players stopped me from getting truly invested, I got close to the end of the story and just stopped caring.
Monster Sanctuary is good but pvp fricked and too much forced status gameplay
Monster Crown is cool with all the stuff you can do with designs but dev has no idea what he wants it to be mechanically
I have played Monster Sanctuary for over 50 hours and never PvP'd in it, nor do I have any desire to. It actually has a very robust amount of difficult and fun single player things to do. For the price, the amount of content it has is amazing. I still have five more or those hidden keeper statues in the magma chamber to battle. Once you beat the game, you have a bunch of those, you can work on 5 starring every boss to collect them, there's a ton of extra optional areas to explore, tons of cool equipment to find, and tweaking all your monsters to have the perfect build is fun as frick.
Monster Crown has weaker gameplay sure, but you can basically make your own monster. You can tweak the stats, moveset, type, color pallet, everything you want to do to make almost whatever the frick you want. Again, the world is actually fun and rewarding to explore. I think it actually does the best job of delivering a monster taming adventure where you can just set out in the world and feel like you actually have your own unique creatures like a special snowflake. What do you think of the starter I made for myself? I used to call it a Beast Slime, since I gave it a bunch of amorphous kinda slimey majin buu kind of attacks, but now I just call it Gigu.
I really, really recommend Disc Creatures. It's a hidden gem and I've never seen anyone else discuss it. Fantastic game with good spritework, good music, great unique gameplay that isn't like anything else I've played, and it's as difficult as you want it to be, since for the entire game you have the ability to delevel any of your monsters by 10 levels in exchange for a small stat boost in whatever stat you choose (It caps after doing this like 10 times or something).
I wish I could enjoy monster sanctuary more, but the music is so awful that I never want to boot it back up.
You can turn the music specifically off. And you don't need to find/talk to an npc to get a special item that allows you to adjust the sound settings either.
I know that, I did it. Playing a game with no music is almost as bad.
The game also got a new battle theme, don't know how long it's been since you tried playing.
That I didn't know.
>Jade Cocoon
b-b-b-b-based
I never forgot bros
The biggest reason is that Pokemon is literally the biggest brand in existence. No matter what another company tries to do, Nintendo/TPC can always out-muscle them in pure advertising.
I think the closest a series came to "killing" pokemon was Yo-Kai Watch in its prime, (at least in Japan) since it went in hard on the storytelling, game polish and the anime in ways that Pokemon had fallen short in.
Of course, Pokemon responded not by making their games better but by going in even harder on Branding, bumping up the anime budget and merchandise to muscle out the competition.
Back when Temtem was first released I did a project where I categorized every Mon in a bunch of monster catcher series to gauge their appeal. It turned out that Pokemon handily had the most balanced representation of all sorts of design types, and Temtem was by far the least.
The fact that SMT and Digimon have about the same breakdown as Pokemon is very telling of what a franchise like this needs to survive.
Because temtem is chinkshit
Because the popular thing about pokemon is the pokemon, not the games. Nobody give a shit about the rpg elements unless you're on here.
Mechanically, Pokemon is a really good game. Probably the deepest, most complex classic turn-based rpg on the market.
Most killers aren’t that. And it’s not easy to notice at first glance, but lacking in the gameplay department is a slow but deadly poison.
Game Freak IS a competent developer, they are not a one-hit wonder and have a decent track record of 7/10 and 8/10 games (Drill Dozer, Pulseman, Mario & Wario, Tembo, etc), but they are lazy and like to pretend they're a small indie team.
Pokemon clones don't have the same polished mechanics (Pokemon has one of the best battle systems in the history of jarpigs), don't have the same appealing designs (look at your own image, it's pretty shameless), and especially don't have the outstanding brand power. Pokemon is huge, it's a multimedia franchise.
Besides, some key markets have very stubborn consumers who are very unwillingly to try something new and would rather play the same old and already established product. Want an example? Japan, look at how Sony tried to push a couple of Monster Hunter clones on the Vita, but they mostly flopped because japanese players would rather play the good and ol' real Monster Hunter.
I wouldn't call them lazy, more like dispirited. They're just given bad deadlines and restrictions, basically told to make the same game every 3 years by a publisher that obviously doesn't care about the game quality and only wants a cheap steady product.
When GF was actually allowed to stretch their legs with PLA they did end up making something actually worthwhile, if not still unpolished as hell due to all the other problems still being the same.
>Sony tried to push a couple of Monster Hunter clones on the Vita
Funny you say that, because they have the exact same problem as pokemon. Monsters in monster hunter have iconic, and well thought out designs, and a gameplay loop that keeps you engaged. I tried all of those hunter clones and while they did great in some areas like certain gameplay elements being super fun like in Toukiden, or having amazing lore like Soul Sacrifice, they didn't have a full package like Monhun and I think that is the same issue with pokemon clones.
Coromon for instance has some pretty sexy pixle graphics but the types suck and the mon designs are too rpg-enemy esqe or just get bigger syndrome
On that note pokemon also has fun human designs to make up for any lacking monster designs.
All the "pokemon killers" minus Digimon which wasn't even meant to be one, all have really shit designs, while the only pokemon-style games I've enjoyed were all spin offs of other series that already had the good designs intact to use for it.
Because Pokemon's success is 100% the name, the fact it's a basic-ass RPG from a media franchise they grew up with, though I'm completely baffled as to why LGPE did badly.
Anyway, yeah, the only people that buy these Pokemon clones are people explicitly buying them to get away from the actual Pokemon franchise, and the vast majority of these clones aren't very good, and aren't much better than the games they're copying.
>LGPE did badly
Did it?
Lol no, don't know where anon got that from, LGPE is still in the switch top 10 sellers
https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/software/index.html
Sorry, underperformed.
You'd think with half the Pokemon fanbase idolizing gen 1 and the other half being casual NPCs that buy all the Pikachu plushie variants, it would've been the #1 Pokemon game on Switch, but instead it had a weak launch and was eventually beaten out by the ILCA DP remake.
You don't understand casuals. The gen 1 worshippers don't buy the games. It's always new gens that sell best.
Because just like "WoW killers, the problem is they are cheap cash grabs. They don't "get" what makes it fun or popular. They just see the surface level stuff. They copy so much directly from Pokemon that there is no point , or they try to do something different and it's super simple, even compared to Gen 1.
I like coromon
Because they always get too close to pokemon and people just think "Man I wanna play pokemon".
They try too much to be Pokemon instead of being genuinely good Monster Collector Games.
It also doesn't help Pokemon's allergic to competition and would rather hold an absolute monopoly on the Monster Collector Subgenre, so shills deliberately hype up other Monster Collectors that aren't from franchises older than Pokemon (SMT, Dragon Quest, etc.) as "Pokemon Killers" in order to drastically raise consumer expectations for this darling little underdog project to topple over the multimedia abomination that is the Electric Mouse's domain.
This obviously doesn't happen and the developers are pressured more than ever to go big or go home, but they literally lack the competency, funding and nostalgia power to actually live up to the title they never asked for.
The game then falls into irrelevancy and people go back to worshipping Pokemon as the "one and only" of the genre, rinse and repeat for every following Monster Collector.
>It also doesn't help Pokemon's allergic to competition and would rather hold an absolute monopoly on the Monster Collector Subgenre, so shills deliberately hype up other Monster Collectors that aren't from franchises older than Pokemon (SMT, Dragon Quest, etc.) as "Pokemon Killers" in order to drastically raise consumer expectations for this darling little underdog project to topple over the multimedia abomination that is the Electric Mouse's domain.
schizopost
No, really. Why do people keep calling these games "Pokemon Killers" if they KNOW what will happen?
Expectations raise through the roof, the pressure's too much, and then it flops.
No actual fan or hopeful watcher of these games would want to actually do that after seeing it happen to all the countless other Monster Collectors.
It happened to fricking Yo-Kai Watch overseas too. Viz decided to latch onto journos calling it the Pokemon Killer and drove it into the dirt before it could ever carve a niche.
No, what's happening here is a mixture of TPCi bribery and do it for free shills using the title to get rid of anything that could push Pokemon out of its comfort zone.
The real reason, the one no one ever grasps, is because they approach development like a typical JRPG. Pokemon is a very simple game with simple mechanics that makes it easy for kids to grasp and approach. Any depth is hidden and unnecessary. Now look at all the other 90s/00s mon franchises. Monster Rancher is crazy complex but was marketed to kids. This meant the show was popular but most children could not get into the games. Digimon? Same deal. We dickride World now but at release most kids couldn't understand it. And then 2 was even more confusing. Same deal as Monster Rancher too kids loved the brand itself, strong ratings and good sales for the original three seasons in both the US and Japan, but games were beyond kids understanding.
I know nostalgia and brand loyalty is everyone's first defense but seriously Pokemon succeeded because those games understood how to be kid targeted JRPGs. Also I would argue that those competitor games were better titles than Pokemon they just failed at being good kid titles.
With one exception. Metabots. The issue there was Natsume was shit at continuing the momentum of the early days and just kind of killed all marketing at some point. Those early titles are quite kid friendly from what I remember.
I believe the only way to do a "Pokemon killer" that is taken seriously is not to reference Pokemon, but to reference the experience of playing Pokemon for the first time.
So instead of a happy-cheery world, make it about a bunch of kids who have a monster-catching interest that the world doesn't really care about. Take a page out of Dark Souls and make everything slightly too big to sell the feeling that you're playing as a kid. Have the player explore backalleys, abandoned buildings and closed passageways, something all kids want to do. The goal is not to make the player feel like they're playing a Pokemon game, but like they're a "kid interested in Pokemon" again.
thats a lot of words to not say anything about the gameplay
There's a couple of reasons:
>Pokemon designs are unmatched
>20+ years of experience vs. literal who developers
>All "Pokemon killers" are just bad games
GF may be a bit slow in the head but their games are mostly filled with polish are care, so marketing your cash grab as a "Pokemon killer" will inevitably kill your own game instead
>so marketing your cash grab as a "Pokemon killer" will inevitably kill your own game instead
And most don't do this. Journalists and Pokemon shills do. Because they KNOW using the term will kill that game and ensure Pokemon remains uncontested.
>Is it because Gamefreak is actually competent?
yes actually GF is really really good and monster and character design.
when the frick have anything killers actually worked?
They try to beat pokemon at being pokemon instead of being their own game
Digimon could easily fly higher than Pokemon if it were given any fricking budget at all, to this day there's still clearly talented and passionate people working on it but bamco refuses to spend more than a hamburger to fund any games
At least what I've seen in the shows, Digimon tends to lean on writing characters who actually develop over time and have real human (or Digimon in some cases) issues, and tries to evoke emotion out of the audience more. I think it strikes a really nice balance that could potentially appeal to a lot more people if bamco cared to cultivate the franchise rather than just begrudgingly let a team of starving and homeless developers and artists work on it because they keep asking and pestering the heads about it. It also helps the Digimon themselves are actual characters, it's a big draw for me personally
The simple answer: Because they're not trying to be their own thing, they're trying to be Pokemon and everyone sees it. It's why the Dragon Quest Monsters series, SMT [outside of Devil Children] and most Digimon games don't carry the "knock off" stigma.
Spectrobes, TemTem, Exomon and Telefang among others were just trying to be "Pokemon but our version" and that just doesn't hold up.