I can't stress this enough, but stop thinking of youtubers as "people". They're not. They're hobby parasites trying to make money and their opinions don't hold water to reality.
I don't really listen to youtubers much, but it's harder to avoid all the mouth-breathers who parrot youtuber opinions as their own. Unrelated side-note: It autistically triggers me that no Pokemon youtuber knows how to pronounced Raikou correctly.
As far as making Pokemon a bit harder goes, for me the most glaring problem with Pokemon games is that Singles is simply not that interesting. The most fun I've ever had with the format is playing through the Stadium games. That's why I've made my own romhacks of gens 3, 5, and 6 to turn every fight into Doubles or Triples and make bosses slightly harder, the games start to feel like a regular RPG this way. I would have done gen 4 as well, but there's coding issues with that. Gen 5 with everything Triples and all the bosses buffed was straight up the most fun I've ever had with Pokemon.
Unfortunately, XY's issues run too deep and even my changes couldn't make it good. The game just showers you in too much EXP, the only way not to massively overlevel everything is if you go way out of your way to gimp yourself in multiple ways. And even the trash mob trainers are weaker on average than earlier games, so you can't just buff the bosses you would need to rework everything.
The point of a nuzlocke is to just play in a way you wouldn't normally. You get a handful of mons, half of which are shit, and you have to make it work. It's fun in the way fire emblem is fun having to use the resources/units you get to unravel the game like a puzzle, and like FE it can end up with you creating bonds with units you didn't expect because your Noctowl clutched Jasmine's Steelix with good hypnosis rng or Maractus ended up being the GOAT of your team when you forgot it existed until you were stuck with it because your Snivy died.
I've never been big on the idea of a Pokemon MMO personally but I'm willing to try it out. One of the big red flags for me is the focus on user created content such as Fakemons.
Maybe I'm just a snob but alot of fakemon designs to me just don't look right one way or another. Alot of them would work great if they were their own thing but when you put them next to the official pokemon you can tell it was designed by a fan most of the time and I mean that in the nicest bad way possible, I can't fault someone for wanting to create their own pokemon and having fun with it, fuck I've done it before too. But stacking them next to official pokemon usually makes them stand out like a sore thumb if you ask me.
Not saying gamefreak has perfect designs though, god no. But to me at the very least you can usually get a sense that gamefreak designed them, there's some kind of intangible aspect to the official designs that I for the life of me could not put my finger on so I'm fully willing to admit that it's just my autism at play.
What I will say though is that I love when fans make regional variants or just variants in general of already existing pokemon. I'm a sucker for things like that.
Hm, if that started in S&M then I'm glad I skipped that generation and only relatively recently emulated it (Ultra Moon). I think that would've stood out to me though. I never played Let's Go but I hear you have a nigger mom or something, that's all I really heard about it.
That would be the Let's Go games, the remakes of Pokemon Yellow. Your mom in SM has a tan, which makes sense as the game takes place in Hawaii. It's also the only region where a large amount of non-white NPCs makes sense, funnily enough, and yet there is still more niggers in XY, to the point I like to joke that the real reason that Lysandre wanted to nuke Kalos was to finally get rid of them.
Re: grinding, HG/SS at least allows you to rematch every gym leader, even if it's locked behind the phone call feature so you can't just call them all at once.
I hate that pretty much only RSE and HGSS allows you to re-battle Gym Leaders. This should be a standard feature in every game, with better teams in the post game.
Nuzlockes are fucking stupid. They don't make the games any harder, they just make you play more cautiously by threatening you with tedious time loss if you lose a Pokemon. The only reason they got popular was because a few people made comics and videos chronicling them in ways that used the "perma-death" as a way to get the audience emotionally invested. It's retarded as the one thing everyone defaults to when their goal is to make Pokemon games more interesting to play because they're too easy.
That's precisely it, I feel like wasting your time with grinding is a punishment for not playing properly(be it because you "lost" a Pokemon in a Nuzlocke or because you didn't level your team efficiently enough and hit a leveled wall). Trying to cheat your way out with items is a bitch move no matter how you slice it, if you don't want to waste your time grinding then you're playing the wrong game. Trick is minimizing how little you need to do it.
Do people seriously grind that much in Pokemon games? I'm not asking facetiously, I'm seriously confused by all the talk I see of needing grind to match Gym Leader levels or people feeling the need grind late-game in Johto. I only grind a little to have new party members catch up in the early-game. Later new catches don't even need that because of EXP Share or just the general spam of trainer battles you start getting mid-game. You might want to grind out 2 or 3 levels before the Elite Four in Kanto or Sinnoh because there's a pretty big level jump in those regions, but otherwise I don't get why some people talk about Pokemon as if they're grindy games.
Do people seriously grind that much in Pokemon games? I'm not asking facetiously, I'm seriously confused by all the talk I see of needing grind to match Gym Leader levels or people feeling the need grind late-game in Johto. I only grind a little to have new party members catch up in the early-game. Later new catches don't even need that because of EXP Share or just the general spam of trainer battles you start getting mid-game. You might want to grind out 2 or 3 levels before the Elite Four in Kanto or Sinnoh because there's a pretty big level jump in those regions, but otherwise I don't get why some people talk about Pokemon as if they're grindy games.
Grinding isn't a big problem since EXP share exists. Still, if you're inefficient, you might find that the new Pokemon you wanted to try out is level 5 or something and you have about 50 levels to grind out before it becomes useful. Pretty annoying, altho if you're running with just one team you will likely not find yourself in this scenario.
If you want to maximize their efficiency, grinding is unavoidable however. Each encounter gives you EVs, and if you're doing a nuzlocke, you want every bit of edge you can. There is a reason why every single game has designated EV training spots for experienced players, past a certain point experience doesn't matter as much as grinding out EVs does. You can't skip this grind, only shorten it if you have Pokerus.
You need to train a pokemon you caught at very low levels to be usable lategame for the E4
You're using a pokemon with one of the slower EXP curves that needs substantially more EXP to reach the same levels as the rest of your party
You play with level-caps and need to be more mindful of where your EXP goes
You're raising a full party of 6 and are in an area with low-level wilds and/or run out of trainers
The vast majority of times my issues are a combination of 2 and 4, usually the latter caused by the former. Depending on what you catch, you can leave an exp share on something and still have it be useless 2 gyms later because it learns jack shit until it evolves and takes an absurd amount of exp because of its species. If my plan for the E4 is "raise the lv 15 dratini until it becomes useful to take care of Lance" then yeah, grinding kind of becomes inevitable at that point.
Do people seriously grind that much in Pokemon games? I'm not asking facetiously, I'm seriously confused by all the talk I see of needing grind to match Gym Leader levels or people feeling the need grind late-game in Johto. I only grind a little to have new party members catch up in the early-game. Later new catches don't even need that because of EXP Share or just the general spam of trainer battles you start getting mid-game. You might want to grind out 2 or 3 levels before the Elite Four in Kanto or Sinnoh because there's a pretty big level jump in those regions, but otherwise I don't get why some people talk about Pokemon as if they're grindy games.
Let's put it like this - in gen 2 the leveling curve flatlines so hard after Goldenrod that you can't reasonably work in a new Pokemon that you find. The post game being severely under leveled doesn't help matters.
Wouldn't it be more interesting to do a challenge where you're not allowed to grind at all, than one where you're encouraged to grind as much as you can and play super cautiously?
Wouldn't it be more interesting to do a challenge where you're not allowed to grind at all, than one where you're encouraged to grind as much as you can and play super cautiously?
I can't disagree, but I think part of the appeal of the nuzlocke also comes from randomness and working within limitations. Yes the grinding and playing super cautiously part sucks, but for some people (myself included) the element of randomness and limitations are part of the fun that sorta outweighs the sucky parts.
A no grinding challenge could be pretty interesting though. Maybe I'll try that some time.
I don't think I could ever get into Sword and Shield. The low LOD in the open world area turns me off more than anything, and the game has a load of problems besides. Even as a junk food type game where I don't think too much of it, pretty much every former game does something better. I haven't looked too hard into the DLCs but even if they were good, the fact they're not just part of the game would irritate me more than I could ever enjoy them.
The only way I can ever play this game was if all the Pokemon were finally brought back. I would say that would never happen, but apparently someone is working on that mod right now. Probably won't come out in a while, but maybe we will see it happen eventually. The new ones just don't interest me for the most part, so I can't even overlook the lack of older ones like I can with Arceus, which introduced a boatload of new regional(archaic?) forms.
I can't disagree, but I think part of the appeal of the nuzlocke also comes from randomness and working within limitations. Yes the grinding and playing super cautiously part sucks, but for some people (myself included) the element of randomness and limitations are part of the fun that sorta outweighs the sucky parts.
A no grinding challenge could be pretty interesting though. Maybe I'll try that some time.
I tried thinking more seriously about what might to be considered for a no grinding challenge after I posted before. I would define no grinding allowed as no fighting wild Pokemon, no rematching trainers, and no fighting "special" trainers that only exist for grinding like the sports players in Nimbasa City in gen 5. I think the main considerations would be
1. In pre-XY games, you'd probably want to focus on only 4 or 5 Pokemon and leave the other 1 or 2 slots for HM slaves. I actually already do this often when playing normally.
2. Depending on the game it might be worth trying to use any Pokemon available really early, like before the first Gym, because they'll be so low level (like level 3) and you won't have that many trainers to get EXP from for both your starter and the new catch.
The 2nd point in particular makes me think you'd rely on your starter a bunch early game in some games like Red/Blue, but that just makes me think of a general problem I have with Pokemon games which is that there's little incentive to not solo the games with your starter. Because of how Singles and EXP work, using your starter for everything until they outlevel the rest of the game by 20+ levels is the most efficient way to beat any game, you kind of have to go out of your way to play how you're "supposed" to with a full team.
If I did any challenge run like this I'd probably do it in one of my Doubles/Triples rom hacks since you're forced to use something else early-game and the EXP getting split up means you can't get so overleveled even if you only use 2 Pokemon meaning you're more incentivized train at least 4 or 5 Pokemon for more coverage. I really do think Pokemon games under the other battle formats are straight up more balanced and fun.
Do people seriously grind that much in Pokemon games? I'm not asking facetiously, I'm seriously confused by all the talk I see of needing grind to match Gym Leader levels or people feeling the need grind late-game in Johto. I only grind a little to have new party members catch up in the early-game. Later new catches don't even need that because of EXP Share or just the general spam of trainer battles you start getting mid-game. You might want to grind out 2 or 3 levels before the Elite Four in Kanto or Sinnoh because there's a pretty big level jump in those regions, but otherwise I don't get why some people talk about Pokemon as if they're grindy games.
Yes. If you play the game normall, you needed to grind little if anything... even less if your strategy is 'use only my starter'. The only problem is if you are facing th Elite Four; you are going to need to grind your entire party up to LV 45... sometimes to LV 40.
By the by, the games have level curves that are clearly balanced at single player. Even the post-game facilities use Open Level instead of LV 100. Those who try to grind to LV 100 will have an already small amount of constantly decaying options because they are playing agains the games' design.
Doubles/triples seem really well suited for a challenge like that. I can totally see a cool situation where you have maybe a lower level support character with Helping Hand to kinda compensate for having an attacker be a little lower level. Slight divergence, are these rom hacks you made yourself that make the whole game doubles/triples only? Because if so, that sounds super fun. I have a randomizer that makes every battle doubles and that's been fun, but sometimes I'd prefer not randomized ones. I started messing with triple battles in PWT a little and thought about how much fun it could be to play a whole game with them.
I hope I'm wrong, but that one weird clip that I referenced and his bluesky account seem to point that he might be. Notice the "gamer girl" chair. I really hope I'm wrong about this, but I've seen this sort of stuff before. I really like his videos, it would be a shame if he trooned out.
