#also hire me pls game freak i have ideas lol

[jisuto]

On the topic of game reception, what are your thoughts on the current state of pokemon?

OK THIS ASK WAS SENT BEFORE THE HUGE LEAK LOL but I have a lot to say:

I watched VHS tapes, played the games, and owned merch since a young age so the series is very special to me. But I don't like the current direction at all and it's not because of the designs or nostalgia. The quality and game performance plummeted so how can I enjoy playing when there's mad lag or low frame rate that hinders my progress and worsen the experience??

It took too many years for them to realize they need to put quality over quantity after the SWSH mess, seeing that they can get away with pretty much ANYTHING and still make huge profit. You see people say that Pokemon should've never went 3D and stay 2D but tbh, it's a series that improves it's graphics as technology advances so it's not a surprise for them to finally go 3D and personally I think that's fine but just keep it looking good and fun (though I would love a 2D/3D hybrid). XY introduced a lot of new features but still lacked in some aspects that still haven't really been solved or added.

Reusing assets is common in the industry but only to a certain extent. They claimed that SWSH was taking a while to make because they were making brand new models which turned out to be a lie and they look like bootleg figures with the new lighting. The 3DS models were ripped from Pokepark, including some animations, but a lot of them still barely have any character. They have their own in-house team (Creatures Inc) so they made the decision NOT to have pokemon properly animated or look alive.... Also they made spin-offs like Ranger, Colosseum, Pokepark, and Pokken which look AMAZING

FRLG took only one year while HGSS was being developed at the same time as Platinum and took 3 years to finish that turned into one of the best games and remakes ever made. As the franchise expands, the team also needs to add more manpower but Game Freak can definitely afford to get more resources to help them?? They can't continue having a ragtag team of like 20 people to make a game back then and do the same now then expect good results... Hire more people who know how create with current gen consoles IT'S COMMON SENSE PLS also I can't believe they had a different company create BDSP knowing how beloved and groundbreaking DPPT was?? No redesigns like the previous remakes and thought it was a good idea to keep it looking a carbon copy to the DS style...

Also it's shocking to see how fan reception can change how the devs direct the next gen ESPECIALLY when it's not even real constructive criticism?? When Unova came out, I remember seeing all the online outcry about "OH THEY HAVE AN ICE CREAM CONE POKEMON AND A TRASH BAG, THEY'RE RUNNING OUT OF IDEAS EW" then actually hear it being repeated at school.... I WAS TRYING TO SURVIVE SINCE DAY 1 IN THE TRENCHES DEFENDING THIS GAME IT WAS ALWAYS GOOD AND DIDN'T NEED 10 YEARS TO AGE WELL. It's crazy how these are the same people who want another Kanto when Trubbish is Grimer (garbage waste) and Vanillite is Voltorb (based on literal items) then you could not catch any other pokemon from different regions in the main game. And the leak confirmed that the disgruntled hate from the west made the devs not release new pokemon in B2W2 and move them over to XY instead AND NOT GIVE A SINGLE GEN 5 MEGA EVOLUTION. So we were robbed because of genwunners who were fixated on the wrong things and ignored all the great content Unova brought us. It's strange how players keep complaining they want a different and fresh game, but want it to continue being super formulaic and binary like wtf do you want make up your mind

None of the switch titles really got me invested and I always end up replaying the older games but hopefully PLZA will break the curse and finally give us a nice game. Also why don't we have more spin-offs on the switch if there's so many of them floating around like the DS had a bunch??? STOP BEING COWARDS I WANT A POKEMON NINTENDOGS GAME OR THAT FIRE EMBLEM CROSSOVER WE WERE SUPPOSED TO GET. I JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN AGAIN ;w;

[iloveschiaparelli]

@sweetsoona To elaborate, basically, the Maze Runner movies were what got me through high school. I probably have watched Scorch Trials alone like 30-40 times since I first saw it in February 2017. My obsessive indulgence into what little BTS content I was able to get my hands on is what led to me deciding I wanted to work on 1 film, then multiple films, and now I want to work on MANY. As most of you probably know, Wes Ball is the director of all 3 movies, they're his first feature film work (Although he was originally hired by Fox straight out of college to develop a feature film based on his college thesis, Ruin. There is even an abandoned facebook page for the feature film. You can actually see a lot of influence from Ruin present in KOTPOTA and throughout the Maze Runner Movies, which I love. But I digress.

As a 17 year old who was freaking obsessed with the Maze Runner and the OST by John Paesano (who also did KOTPOTA btw), who had also recently discovered how to download Ren'Py and make visual novels with it (shitty ones, only one of which made it to release and which I will take to my grave with me because it was Very Cringe and I mean apocalyptically so.) I also am a 2D digital artist.

So in February 2020, in one afternoon I learned about the Mouse Guard feature film dir. Wes Ball and in the very same afternoon 20 minutes later learned about it being cancelled in the Disney Fox acquisition. TO THIS DAY I am still bitter about it, especially now that I've read some of the comics and realized how badly we have been burned by the cancellation. If I ever win the lottery I am giving Wes Ball full funding and unconditional artistic freedom to make it happen. Just let me be a PA 👉👈.

Anyway this all came together, with the first several weeks of quarantine, to create the perfect storm. I decided I was going to make an otome where you go on a date with Wes Ball and get married, and the game would be filled with BTS content for whatever movie was being made (i hadn't learnt it yet but it would have been KOTPOTA lol) and my idea is that it would be one of a series of games about my fav directors. In hindsight, as someone who has now been in film a bit, CRINGE!!!!!!! Filmmakers are real people too. Can't believe I did this. But anyway I drew my own BGs and CGs and started making the script from scratch. it was barely any content but here is the kiss CG I had put together for when he kisses you over dinner at a fancy restaurant while wearing that RATTY HAT that Wes Ball wore in LITERALLY EVERY ON SET INTERVIEW UNTIL KOTPOTA at which point I assume it was just too thoroughly in rags to keep wearing.

And here is a screen recording of the entire irredeemably embarassing 2 minutes of content I made. Unedited. It's been 4 years since I made this and I legitimately forgot it existed until 2 weeks ago when I found my old ren'py project files on a thumb drive in my bedroom. Also, in hindsight, I really should have dreamed bigger and made the player character like, part of the crew or something. A magazine journalist is so much less believable. Also Wes Ball if you see this I am in film school dropout limbo due to economic disaster in a city with no film activity pls help <3

On my hands and knees begging you to elaborate because What

— @sweetsoona

This is the original tag anon is referring to

[near-seth-experience]

I know everyone clamors about wanting a Sinnoh remake, and while that’s something I’d love to see, I think they are capable of doing more/better.

this is a long post, so read more:

If I remember right, the excuse for not having every Pokemon in Sword/Shield was the amount of resources or something, right? Well, I was thinking about how they could potentially work around some of the more demanding technical aspects of the game, and an idea popped into my head when I was considering possible ways to simplify.

I was remembering how battles looked back in the day. I pulled up some gifs like this:

and I compared them with modern Pokemon, which can be anywhere from simple to the over-the-top Gigantamax moves:

Comparing the two, I cannot imagine Scorbunny’s Double Kick animation in 2019 took any more relative effort than the leaf blade in 2003. The main things that catch my eye in the Scorbunny gif are the weather, the background, and the idle animations of each pokemon. Back in the day, the pokemon were static images. At most, they would slide to signify movement. The backgrounds were a texture underfoot with a color scheme relative to the surroundings in the overworld. The weather would only show up between turns to remind the player of the ongoing effect.

If we dumb a new game down and bring battles back to 2D, that would cut down a significant amount. Enough, I’d wager, to make a full dex (and more) much more than viable. And if we’re going to downgrade the look of battles, we would have to adjust the rest of the game as well so that it isn’t jarring or out-of-place, which would cut down even more. 

The surroundings in recent Switch Pokemon games, especially outside, is pretty active and responsive. The vegetation, like bushes and flowers, sway in the breeze, and you push apart tall grass as you walk through. 

Back in the day, not so much. (this is a still image, but you know what I mean. it might as well be a gif. Shush)

In Let’s Go and SwSh, they animated a walk cycle for every available pokemon, they animated fainting, they animated getting hit, and they each have an animation for interacting with the trainer. 

In the scene below from HGSS, Dragonite’s overworld animation is like a two-frame sprite that they slid across the room. The wings are either up or down. If you interact with your partner Pokemon as it follows you in the overworld, it might do a little spin or hop at most.

If all ~900 (I think Calyrex puts us at 898) were to be included in a modern game, they would each need animations for battle, overworld sprites, movement animations, trainer interactions, expressions, and other stuff I’m probably not thinking about, with shiny variants on top of all of that. But, if all of the pokemon were in a game like HGSS, all that’s required would be the effort needed to make new assets. Tech limitations would be a non-issue.

But, it’s almost 2021. People nowadays would expect something of Nintendo DS quality or lower to be free in the app store. They would need to simultaneously dumb it down and improve the visuals to make something that would sell. It took a long way for me to circle back to it, but the idea that popped into my head that I mentioned at the beginning of the post was in regards to this conundrum.

I think a surefire way to breathe new life into Pokemon would be if they created a massive return-to-form and took stylistic notes from Square Enix.

Specifically,if they took inspiration from the look of Octopath Traveler:

Imagine this at night, with a Spiritomb or Gastly in front of the center tombstone.

Imagine a Pokemon Center and Mart in place of some of the houses. Modernize the architecture.

Angle the perspective of the battle in the classic Pokemon style, with your sprites in the bottom left, and the opposing ones in the top right. Imagine the traditional Pokemon battle Names & Health/EXP bars in their respective locations, and the interface in the bottom: fight / bag / poké / run.

And then, imagine the size of the game. Pokemon Platinum, for example, was (according to a few google results, unit conversion, and rounding up) somewhere close to 0.1-0.12 gigabytes. Pokemon Sword/Shield was something like 10gb, with another few gb on top for the two expansions.

Octopath Traveler is (again, google) 2.9gb

If you weigh all of the new assets required to make a Pokemon game in a similar style, (that’s all 900 Pokemon, all of the visual effects/lighting/shading, all of the textures in the world, all of the buildings, characters, animations, attacks, backgrounds, etc) against those in a modern 3D Pokemon title like SwSh, it would be incredibly lightweight, but an undertaking like this would still require a lot of time.

If you’re already keeping the fans waiting, and technical limitations cease being an issue, I say go big. It needs to be a labor of love. We’ll need more than one region to show off the entire dex. Pull a trick out of Gen 2′s book. Let us beat the Sinnoh League and then tell us to Surf and Waterfall our way to another region. Don’t just give us Sinnoh. Give us Sinnoh, Unova, and Kalos.

Or, better yet, if you really want to flex the creative muscles, give us Sinnoh, and then go crazy. Rework spinoff regions and write new stories. Redesign the Orre region from Colosseum & XD or show us Fiore & Almia from the Ranger games. There’s tons of untapped potential that can be brought into the canon of mainline titles.