Pokemon moves are mostly unrealistic with the exception of things like tackle and body slam; however, in some cases there is a basic kind of “physics” to them, at least for the pokemon world. What I’m trying to ask is… are there any attacks you like the concepts of in how they’re performed and by what? Likewise are there any you particularly don’t like? example: I like moonlight, using affiliation with the moon for energy,but I don’t like how surf just conjures a wave out of nothing.
Honestly, I kinda think that trying to explain specific moves is asking for trouble. There’s such a massive variety of attacks, almost all of which are available to many different Pokémon, that you’re bound to get stuff that’s absolutely ludicrous when you stop to think about it. Surf conjuring a wave out of nothing is a bit strange, but really it’s an extension of the way Water moves in general conjure water out of nothing (there’s no way a Squirtle can have enough water inside his own body to sustain a Water Gun for more than a few seconds). And I don’t think anyone knows how Baton Pass is supposed to work.
In general, I like moves that are relatively exclusive, because those are the ones that have a very specific meaning in terms of the nature of a Pokémon’s powers. Signature moves, obviously, but also stuff like Moonlight, as you mentioned, or Morning Sun, which have some nice flavour connotations for the sources of energy a Pokémon uses (Morning Sun, for instance, is a far more exclusive technique than Synthesis and is connected with Pokémon like Espeon, Togetic and Volcarona, suggesting that Pokémon who use it are drawing on sunlight for energy in a far more abstract, ‘magical’ sense than Pokémon who use Synthesis). Aura Sphere is another, which implies a connection with some sort of ‘soul energy’ or whatever you want to call it.
Conversely, it’s the moves that are the most widely available that tend to bug me, because those are the ones that are most likely to belong to Pokémon who have no business using them. Everyone brings up Focus Punch, which is available to a couple of clearly armless Pokémon like Togekiss, but my personal favourite is Aerial Ace. Now, yes, I know Aerial Ace is supposed to be a reference to an old Japanese sword move, the ‘turning swallow cut,’ but 1. it’s a Flying-type attack, 2. the only Pokémon who learn it by levelling are bird Pokémon (and… er… Heracross… for some reason… although Heracross can actually fly), and 3. whether you imagine it requiring flight or not, it carries connotations of extreme speed. Aerial Ace is available to a number of Pokemon who blatantly cannot fly and, in some cases, weigh hundreds of kilograms, including Tyranitar, Ursaring, Tangrowth, Metagross, Nidoqueen (but not Nidoking, so clearly they thought it was particularly appropriate to Nidoqueen for some reason), Slaking (!), Aggron (!!?), Maractus, Groudon, Armaldo, Bouffalant, Stoutland, Registeel (but not Regirock or Regice, so again they must have thought that this was an especially good move for Registeel in particular), Crustle (?), Ferrothorn (?!) and, of all things, Slowbro (but, once again for reasons beyond my comprehension, not Slowking, so someone must have thought at some point “what can we give Slowbro to emphasise the differences between him and Slowking? Oh; I know, AERIAL ACE.”).
I am a fairly new reader, so sorry if you’ve already said something about this, but WHY is that every archeologist in the games (with the exception of Cynthia, she is awesome) a crazed looter. Is there something wrong with their system or collage classes, or what? Cofragius makes it a little better, but not enough.
Oh, it’s not Pokémon’s fault. It’s just what people expect archaeologists to be. Personally I blame Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. There is a wonderful piece of writing that’s been floating around for a few years, purporting to be a letter of rejection for Indiana Jones’ application for tenure at Marshall College.
It’s always an eye-opener when you have to explain to people what archaeologists actually do. Sensible characters like Cynthia and Lenora are a step in the right direction (although I must say, Cynthia’s outfit would not last long on a dig site).
White 2 Playthrough Journal, episode 1: Where the f@#k are we?
So, I’ve finally gotten around to playing White 2, in tandem with my best friend Jim, who’s playing Black 2. We have both studiously avoided any spoilers up until this point, and are meeting these games with fresh eyes. This entry, and those that will follow it, are the results of our experiences as we flail madly through the games, smiting all who stand in our way. So, without further ado…
Bright lights! Loud noises! Dragons! Protagonists striking their most badass poses! Starter Pokémon! Villains! Douchebag whom I assume is the rival! Eccentric scientist with a book! MORE DRAGONS! COBALION! TERRAKION! VIRIZION! DRAAAAGON!
…yeah, it’s the opening cutscene. Honestly I feel Pokémon’s opening cutscenes are not really as good as they have been or could be; I think they peaked in the second and third generations. The Diamond and Pearl one was, quite blatantly, “LOOK AT ME I’M 3D LOOKATMELOOKATME I AM USING THE DS’S GRAPHICAL CAPABILITIES TO A FAR GREATER EXTENT THAN THE GAME ITSELF EVER WILL,” while the Black and White one was totally cryptic and very difficult to understand until after completing the game, but did manage to give away what ought to have been one of the games’ more important twists (the fact that N is allied with Team Plasma). This is just a generic montage of stuff that’s clearly going to be important in the game, and I don’t know whether I even care. Moving right along.
We quickly rush through all the usual awkwardness of Professor Juniper meeting you and needing help to decide whether she’s looking at a boy or a girl. I, at Jim’s insistence, am a girl (apparently we need to see whether anything happens differently for a female player, and he thought of it first, the little bastard), which means that I am the illegitimate love child of Mickey Mouse and Princess Leia, and he is a kid who styles his hair after a bushel of wheat. Professor Juniper introduces us to our lifelong friend (I guess?), Hugh, an aggressive-looking spiky-haired fellow, and gives the traditional “Pokémon are wondrous creatures, journey, exploration, growth, battle, partnership, aren’t Pokémon great?” spiel, before promptly buggering off out of our lives. Her influence persists, though, since she immediately contacts our mother (for the purposes of this commentary I will assume we are brother and sister, not that it’s likely to matter) and tells her that we are to receive our first Pokémon. When mother dear asks us, we protest that we don’t want Pokémon, have no idea what a Pokédex is, and certainly have no wish to go on a journey to complete one, but our pleas are, of course, in vain – mother is a forceful woman, and pressures us into accepting Professor Juniper’s assignment. Our contact, Bianca (oh, lord, that Bianca?) is here already, and we need to find her! With an exaggerated, synchronised sigh, we leave the house and- wait, where the hell are we?
This… doesn’t look like Nuvema Town. Er… in fact, this doesn’t look like any city in Unova. How did we get here and what is going on? Juniper? Is this you? Have we been drugged? CURSE YOU, JUNIPER!
Before we can get over our disorientation, we meet our friend Hugh and his little sister. Hugh already has a Pokémon, and is excited that we’re getting ours because he’s sick of having no other trainers around to battle and needs a travelling companion he can trust. His sister comments that she hopes we’ll take good care of our Pokémon when we get them, to which Hugh just… sort of looks at her coldly, says “yeah…” and gets right back to what he was saying before. Oo…kaay… Upon further investigation, we quickly conclude that Hugh is a very strange and possibly dangerous boy. His mother, when questioned, expresses a hope that we’ll keep Hugh on the right path and stop him from getting trouble… since he’s… “the sort of person who lets his rage build up inside him.” His father, perhaps even more alarmingly, mentions that “his goal is…” and then just… sort of… trails off ominously. Uh… Hughie, dear… don’t take this the wrong way, but… has anyone ever told you that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering? Just, um… just FYI.
With Hugh in tow, we explore the town and learn that we are in Aspertia City, a town somewhere out the ass end of nowhere in south-eastern Unova, a part of the region that wasn’t accessible two years ago in Black and White. Unlike every other starting location in the games’ history, Aspertia City boasts a fully-functional Pokémon Centre, a fairly large population, and a Pokémon Trainers’ School (though this latter building is presently closed). Jim and I eventually find Bianca, the klutzy lunatic rival character of Black and White, perched atop Aspertia City’s high observation platform. Bianca presses our starter Pokémon into our hands – for Jim, a Snivy named Ulfric, and for me, an Oshawott whom I name Jaime. She also thrusts a Pokédex at each of us, and gives one to Hugh for good measure, because the more expensive technology she hands out to random teenagers, the better. Hugh immediately challenges us to a battle with his egg-raised starter Pokémon (as you might imagine, Jim sees a Tepig and I see a Snivy). Once Hugh has been suitably trounced, he dashes off to begin his adventure while Bianca drags us down to the Pokémon Centre and gives us the standard lecture on what an awesome place it is, along with a gift of ten Pokéballs – previous games give you five, enough to fill out a party; Bianca is clearly either anxious to get this show on the road or extremely pessimistic about our capture skills. Possibly both. Mother, a dutiful sort, appears and hands us pairs of running shoes, while Hugh’s sister gives us our Town Maps, along with a spare for Hugh himself, when we find him. With all of that out of the way, all we need to do is learn how to catch Pokémon… from, of all people, Bianca, the most scatterbrained Pokémon trainer in recorded history (but at least she arguably knows what she’s doing, in contrast to the caffeinated octogenarian who teaches trainers the same skill in Viridian City)… and set off for the next town!
Only… it looks like we have another familiar face to groan at first.
Going to put that aside for one moment
So, I think because it’s just that time of year, I’m not seeing much participation or discussion on that last post of my create-a-Pokémon project thing. In particular, a lot of the concepts we had earlier just haven’t coalesced into actual Pokémon yet. The thought occurs that I just picked a really terrible time to try something that requires a lot of reader participation. I want everyone to bookmark that post, and keep thinking about your ideas and everyone else’s. Comment whenever you have something to say, and please do talk about other people’s ideas if you have anything to add to them! I want to leave that project where it is for another couple of weeks, though; hopefully people will come up with more stuff in that time.
While that’s going on, I have something else to work on.
It really is past time I started ranting about Black and White 2…
What is your opinion on the twisted story of Amber, Mewtwo’s soul mate?
Disclaimer: I haven’t actually seen the Birth of Mewtwo, so this is all coming from someone who knows the story at second hand.
(For anyone who doesn’t know the story: Amber was the daughter of Mr. Fuji, the dude who runs the Lavender Town Pokémon shelter and headed up the team of scientists who originally created Mewtwo. Amber had died as a child, and Fuji’s real aim in the project was to clone her; Mewtwo was just a gimmick to convince Giovanni to fund him. Mewtwo’s telepathic abilities allowed him and Ambertwo to converse while they were growing in their pods, and the cloned girl was his only friend. Unfortunately, while Mewtwo’s incredible powers kept him alive while he grew to maturity, Ambertwo died before she became strong enough to leave her pod. Ambertwo encouraged Mewtwo to believe that life is something to be celebrated, but his grief at losing her should probably be taken to be at least partly responsible for his massive existential angst and his rather bleak outlook.)
I don’t think I’d call it ‘twisted;’ I’m not sure what you’re getting at there. Sad, certainly; it reminds me of nothing so much as two sick kids meeting in a hospital ward. I think that the story provides an opportunity to examine the theme of identity that would have been the central idea of Mewtwo Strikes Back if only the battles and the weird self-defeating ‘violence is wrong’ message hadn’t gotten in the way. Poor Ambertwo seems to have all of the original Amber’s memories, so she theoretically has to deal with one of the same questions Mewtwo asks – “Am I Amber, or just Amber’s shadow?” – but her own childish innocence makes it a non-issue for her; although she insists that she’s Amber on the inside, she doesn’t really think the question matters and is happy just to be alive. I think that in the end, after all the chaos and destruction of Mewtwo Strikes Back, Mewtwo finally comes to see things the same way.
The last person’s question got me thinking. How would you feel if pokemon included timed hits in its turn-based mechanics, like in the Mario RPG and Paper Mario series. I personally wouldn’t mind if it included the option to turn it off, but I’d imagine a lot of fans might find this uncomfortable. Your thoughts?
In case anyone doesn’t know what this question is talking about, ‘timed hits’ are a system that gives a boost in power to a move if the player manages to tap a button at exactly the right point in the attack animation.
It sort of has the feel of ‘change for the sake of change,’ which I try to avoid if I can. You seem to be starting by asking whether it would make the game worse in any respect, which I think is the wrong way of going about it. Start by asking what it does to improve the game. If the answer is “nothing” or “very little” then trying to tweak it so it doesn’t make the game worse is a waste of time anyway. If the best we can say of a change is that we “wouldn’t mind” then it’s not a change that’s worth making.
As to timed hits in particular… I think the main draw to including a system like this would be that it creates an impression of trainer participation in battles. Your presence and your precise instructions, given as the battle unfolds, are actually allowing your Pokémon to be more effective than it would be if it were fighting on its own.
The downside is that we’re adding an additional dimension to the gameplay which requires completely different skills. It raises the ceiling for the power your Pokémon are able to reach, but makes that ceiling easier for some players to reach than others. At the highest levels of competitive play, it slants the game’s balance towards offensive strategies. At lower levels, it makes things more unpredictable and random, allowing reaction times to influence outcomes at the expense of strategy. You could include an option to turn the system off, true, but then you’ve got to use some kind of difficulty adjustment for the in-game battles to compensate for the fact that Pokémon with timed hits active are going to be hitting significantly harder.
The bottom line, for me, is that the only potential advantages I can see for this are in the way the game ‘feels’ and the way trainers’ relationships with their Pokémon are portrayed. There are better ways of doing exactly the same thing without messing around with the battle system, which won’t run the risk of messing up the game balance. It’s a mechanical change that doesn’t actually improve the game mechanics, so I’d be inclined to stay away from it.
I am still alive
To my astonishment I am still alive, after working security for a week at one of the biggest music festivals in my country. I haven’t looked at my inbox yet, or any of the comments on the last couple of posts; I just wanted to let everyone know that I am here, mostly healthy, and will get around to it just as soon as I finish sleeping for twelve hours straight.
In the meantime, go and read this article. Friend of mine posted the link on Facebook. It has absolutely nothing to do with Pokémon, at all, but it is exactly the point I was trying to make when I defended PETA in this post a little while back. It is rather well-written and, whether you agree with it or not, the ideas it discusses are relevant to anyone who regularly engages with fiction (that is to say, absolutely everyone).
http://gyzym.tumblr.com/post/39004853136/just-shut-up
Also happy new year. May your new year’s resolutions briefly illuminate the bleak misery of your lives with a ray of hope before their inevitable failure causes you to descend back into the neverending drudge of existence in this cold universe.
Look, I don’t do happy. It makes me ill.
Down to brass tacks
Okay; good. I’m liking what I see so far. I’ve decided not to create another poll at this point after all – I have a quiet suspicion the result would be a foregone conclusion. Instead I’m just going to say that we now have some pretty extensive discussion of how the ideas of Fire and Water can work together, and that this should hopefully be a solid place to start from. Now it’s time to come up with some more specific design ideas – start actually describing Pokémon in detail and talking about their powers, behaviour and appearance.
Here’s the deal. I’m going away for work after Christmas and probably won’t have internet access. I’ll still be in the comments tomorrow and on Boxing Day, but this is probably the last think I’ll post until after I get back, which won’t be until the 2nd of January. That’s, like, a week of discussion time. Here’s what I’m hoping people can do:
1. Read the comments on the previous two entries, and everything that’s been said there. There’s some good stuff. Use it. (Incidentally, my last entry, the summation of all the concepts I’d seen so far, has been updated with an 8th concept and a little extra on the 6th).
2. If you want to describe a Pokémon based on any of those concepts, or on something completely different that hasn’t been discussed yet, write up a short paragraph about it. I would prefer that you keep any artwork to yourself at this point. I don’t want people judging these ideas by the quality (or absence) of art attached to them.
3. Comment on other people’s ideas. Suggest ways to improve on them, if you can!
Just to make that absolutely clear: after Boxing Day (New Zealand time, so that’ll still be Christmas Day for a lot of my readers in America) I am gone. You’re on your own. You’re all a clever bunch, though – right? I’m sure you can figure something out. I suppose I’ll put together another poll of some sort when I get home.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all the rest of that stuff!
Have you played any RPGs other than Pokemon? If so, could game freak learn any lessons that are relevant to Pokemon by playing these RPGs? Also, would you recommend any of them to Pokemon fans?
Hrm. Well, I’m a big fan of BioWare’s CRPGs; I’ve had a lot of fun with the Baldur’s Gate series, Neverwinter Nights, and Knights of the Old Republic. I’ve also had some experience with Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, and have been spending far too much time lately playing Skyrim. I think these games can potentially provide a lot of nice examples of how to tell a story through the medium of a video game, and how to craft a markedly less linear plot – with the caveat that what Pokémon is trying to do is, in many ways, quite different, in terms of both the overall tone and outlook of the setting, and the inherent requirements of the gameplay mechanics.
Pokémaniacal 