Tag: QandA

Hi. This is a mechanics question about abilities and things. If Game Freak, for some unfathomable Game Freak reason, decided to make a Pokémon literally 100% unbeatable (Except against itself) How do you think they would do it? Wonder guard Spiritomb for example, or Sheer Cold + No Guard + fast Pokémon?

Hmm.

Well, neither of those would actually do it; not quite.  Wonder Guard isn’t impenetrable; it can be bypassed by weather damage, entry hazards and, critically, poison damage (so Toxic will still put an end to you pretty quickly if you don’t have Rest or Refresh) – all these things are the real reason Shedinja seems interesting on paper but just doesn’t hold up in reality.  Pokémon with Mold Breaker or its equivalents can also hit you.  Sheer Cold with No Guard doesn’t work either, because even with No Guard some Pokémon like Gigalith and Skarmory are just flat-out immune thanks to Sturdy, and you can still be hurt and perhaps beaten by priority attacks.  Either method can also be stopped by Gastro Acid.

Honestly, I’m not sure anything would do it.  You can obviate the need for Wonder Guard by just giving the Pokémon epic defensive stats and Recover or something, but you’d still need Sturdy so that people can’t one-shot you, and Magic Guard to keep them from wearing you down – you can’t have both (sure, if you have Rest, you can deal with Toxic and other indirect damage pretty easily… but without Magic Guard you’re still vulnerable to Darkrai).  Even then, Gastro Acid, Entrainment and Simple Beam can still deny you your ability, and you’re still vulnerable to Counter and Mirror Coat, so you’ll need to be careful to kill things very slowly.  You can keep Struggle from ruining your day, at least, if your Pokémon can use Recycle, by continually reusing a Leppa Berry.

Obviously there are loads of ways to make a Pokémon that is unbeatable for all intents and purposes, but I don’t think the game mechanics as they stand actually allow for anything completely airtight.

Well, short of giving a Pokémon an ability that says “this Pokémon is immune to all damage and 1-hit-KO moves.”  But really, come on.

How do you feel about combat in Pokemon vs combat in Final Fantasy? Both are entirely different but they are both turn-taking RPGs. Are there elements either could benefit with taking from the other?

Disclaimer: The most recent Final Fantasy game I have played is X (I think they’re up to, what, fourteen or something now?) so I am partially speaking from ignorance here.

Hmm.  I’m not sure there’s anything that would help, particularly.  Most of each game’s distinctive features have counterparts in the other that work differently but serve the same purpose.  Materia, for instance, provides essentially the same gameplay function as TMs – offering a broad base of powers that can be used by most or all characters.  Limit Breaks, as far as FF VII goes, give the individual characters their own special powers, which is something Pokémon already has quite a lot of.  Their item systems work in essentially the same way, and so do their status effect systems – Final Fantasy has a lot more status effects than Pokémon does, but I’m not sure there’d be an particular benefit to bringing that over.  I suppose one feature of Final Fantasy games I’ve always found interesting is the way the turn system works – not one-for-one, but based on a character’s speed, so very fast characters can potentially take more turns than slower ones as well as simply taking them first.  It’s interesting, but shifting that across to Pokémon would be a balance nightmare – it’s not like speed isn’t already an important stat!  As for going the other way… well, the same objections apply; Final Fantasy wouldn’t have much use for TMs, there’s no particular reason to simplify the way speed works in those games or reduce the number of different status effects, and Pokémon’s expansive and complicated type chart would sort of be a waste of time in a game with fewer than ten different player characters – Final Fantasy’s simpler elemental system makes a lot more sense for the needs of the game.  I can’t really think of anything else…

It might be interesting to see the whole idea of Pokémon adapted to a Final Fantasy game, with a sort of ‘beast master’ type character who can tame and raise monsters to fight for the party.  In terms of gameplay, though, a similar niche is already filled by Final Fantasy’s ‘Blue Mage’ character archetype, which can absorb and learn the techniques of the monsters it fights, so… eh.

Dear Sir, I asked the question almost a week ago. I am sorry to you and Random Access for any confusion. Yes, it was mainly about pokemon, perhaps the confusion was why your answer was very short. For example Ash Ketchum was accused of such, such as when his pokemon protected him from the cold in the Snow in the cave, few thought of it as slaves or Stockholm syndrome but to me it seemed a very poor simplified misunderstanding. Hence why I asked on simplified judgments such as on those two topics

Yeah, it… sometimes takes me a while to get around to answering these, especially if I’m not sure what to say immediately… eheh…

Okay, so, what you’re actually saying is that you think ‘consent’ should not automatically prevent us from labelling Pokémon training as slavery?  That is an interesting point.  As I said, I don’t think slavery actually precludes consent if you go by a dictionary definition; I just can’t think of any real-world examples of consensual slavery (well, except for people who are born into slavery and simply never think to challenge it, but that’s sort of a different issue – that happens in Pokémon training too, when trainers hatch eggs, but I think here we’re mainly considering cases where there is an actual moment of capture).  If you look at it from a strictly definitional or legal perspective, then it depends on whether you consider a Pokémon a person (I suspect the laws and governments of the Pokémon world do not) and on whether trainers actually own their Pokémon in a legally binding sense (and I suspect that they do, although unsurprisingly I don’t think the question has ever come up).  If we say “yes, Pokémon are people too” (which is something I’m reasonably comfortable doing, for the sake of argument) and assume that there is legal ownership involved, then that would mean that Pokémon training is, in fact, slavery – the difficulty is that it would be slavery of a kind that has never actually existed in the real world (as far as I know – if anyone knows of a real culture that practised consensual slavery, please do speak up!), which gives the word an extremely limited heuristic value.  Would we actually consider slavery a bad thing if it were almost always consensual and strictly regulated to ensure slaves’ wellbeing?  I don’t think you can easily answer that question, since (again, as far as I know) it’s never happened.  We’re kind of going off the deep end of cultural relativism there.

What I said about Stockholm syndrome the first time stands, I think.  I mean, I’m not a psychologist, so perhaps I don’t understand the phenomenon as well as I should, but I’m pretty sure that Stockholm syndrome is, by definition, something experienced by prisoners, and is normally used to describe victims in a hostage situation.  I would say that, if there is consent involved from the beginning, especially if the subordinate party is free to leave (as I do believe Pokémon are), it’s not Stockholm – just plain old friendship.

P.S. You really don’t need to call me ‘sir’.  I’m not exactly an authority figure here. 🙂

EDIT: Actually, there’s another point I hadn’t thought of – slaves are commodities.  There is a market (in the abstract, economic sense) for slaves in societies that have them; slaves are bought and sold regularly for prices dictated by market forces.  Do people buy and sell Pokémon?  The only example I can think of is the game corner, which is problematic, firstly because the original game corner in Red and Blue was a Team Rocket operation, so using it as our standard for legitimacy is clearly suspect, and secondly because later iterations of the game corner stopped offering Pokémon and started dealing only in rare items (which suggests to me that the designers may have been aware of the incongruity and deliberately chosen to remove it).  Pokémon can be traded; they can be exchanged for other Pokémon, but not for money, or indeed anything else, as far as I know.  Can anyone else think of any other situation in which Pokémon are bought and sold legitimately?  If not, then that would suggest that Pokémon trainers do not have total freedom to do as they wish with their Pokémon (or, at the very least, that Pokémon are considered uniquely valuable in a way which would make traditional chattel slavery difficult to accommodate).

Dear Sir, I have been deeply interested in ethics, discovered video game’s. GTA and CoD being most famous of these things and I discovered your article and read it. Also I have read opinions of others. I concluded that people easily can make simplified yet incorrect of judgments. Am I wrong? Also, is it slavery consent or not? Same with Stockholm syndrome. From me, I think its a case of what has some similarities but not specifically. However, people generalize on the surface. Y/N? Thank You Sir

Okay, I admit I’m not… totally sure exactly what you’re asking, but let’s see… You asked ‘yes or no?’ so…

Can people easily make simplified yet incorrect judgements?
Well, yes.  All the time, unfortunately, especially about subjects that aren’t matters of measurable, objective fact, like ethics.  That probably includes me, much as I might try to avoid it.

Is it still slavery if there is consent?
…hmm.  You know, I’m not sure.  If you look at a dictionary definition of slavery, I don’t think it matters – slavery is simply the state of being owned by someone, regardless of how you came to be in that state, and I suppose in theory you could become a slave willingly, if you lived in a society that permitted it, by selling yourself.  I don’t think that’s common, though, and I suspect that in practice we’d be more likely to consider that indentured servitude rather than slavery.  I think slavery is generally understood to imply lack of consent.

EDIT: I suppose there’s debt-bondage, where a person who cannot pay a large enough debt is automatically enslaved to the creditor, but I don’t know if I’d call that consent, as such, even in a society where debt-bondage is accepted as the natural consequence of defaulting on a loan.

Stockholm syndrome?
Well, Stockholm syndrome refers to developing sympathetic feelings for one’s captor, and you can’t really call someone your captor if you’re consenting, can you?  I’d say that one is a contradiction in terms.

What party members have you used throughout Final Fantasy?

I tend to swap them in and out.  Is that weird?  I sort of get the impression that the designers didn’t expect a lot of people to play like that, because the materia system makes switching party members on a regular basis a huge pain.

Oh, except for Yuffie.  I never used Yuffie much because I have irrational hatred for her.