Tag: sun and moon

Anonymous asks:

would you want a wolf Pokemon and should it evolve at night only? How would you make a wolf Pokemon?

Well, it would make a sort of sense to have one in the generation calling its games “Sun” and “Moon,” wouldn’t it?  Given the general symbolism of wolves as lunar animals in European folklore, anyway.  Then again, I think the themes that would be my go-to ideas for a wolf Pokémon have been ‘done’ elsewhere – like, Zoroark already kinda works as a ‘werewolf’ Pokémon despite being a fox and not a wolf because of its powers of darkness and ability to appear as a human, and Mightyena already deals with the teamwork theme that would be inspired by wolves’ pack hunting skills, despite being a hyena and not a wolf.  That’s not to say you couldn’t still do one, just that I’d probably try to go with something a lot more offbeat, like these guys.  I’m not sure off the top of my head what I would go with.

RandomAccess asks:

You’re running out of gen 6 Pokemon. Are you confident that Sun and Moon will be out by the time you’re finished?

What, these things?  Nah, I’ll just stop for a while and pick them up again once I’ve played the game.  Might even post them concurrently with my reviews of the 7th generation Pokémon, since I probably have to do those.

…wait do I have to think of something else that I can post on a daily basis now

is that how this works

$#!t

Anonymous asks:

I know you don’t like to speculate, but what would your opinion be on Sun and Moon bringing in facets of the Ranger games / mentality into the main series (as some people apparently think due to similarities between the ranger regions and alola)? It’s pretty unlikely, but what do you think such a thing could add to world-fleshing-outness, conflict, story, et cetera?

Well, I think you’re right about it being unlikely – the fact that Alola is an island region (if that’s what we’re getting at?  Not sure what else there is) seems like a pretty flimsy reason to make a prediction like that to me.  But having said that, I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad idea to, say, replace HMs for field moves with a minigame where you convince a wild Pokémon to temporarily join you and help you to clear an obstacle.  HM moves are a pain, and you can potentially get a nice sense of negotiation with the wild Pokémon, show how they fit into their environment, and emphasise that wild areas really belong to them.  Other parts of the Ranger philosophy, like having only one partner Pokémon rather than large teams, seem incompatible with the basic assumptions of the gameplay; you could have characters who live with Pokémon in that way, but I suspect that much of the significance of that would be lost if the player wasn’t the one doing it.  If you don’t actually play from the Rangers’ perspective, they probably just seem from the outside like trainers who only have one Pokémon.  You can’t really make the Rangers the villains either, for obvious reasons, although a faction like that certainly would have been an interesting presence in a story like that of Black and White, just to make things more complicated for everyone – what would they have thought of Ghetsis’ rhetoric of Pokémon liberation?  It would be also interesting to introduce some new mechanics that emphasise the uniqueness of the player’s relationship with the starter Pokémon in the same way as the Ranger games do, but that’s probably something you have to build from scratch to serve the very different gameplay of the core series.

vikingboybilly asks:

The rotomdex is freaky! It’s too drastic of a change! Please beg gamefreak to keep everything exactly the same, waaaah.

I like the Rotomdex!  I think it raises a lot of interesting questions.  The developers of the Pokédex have apparently chosen, instead of going to all the trouble and expense of programming an AI, to just enlist a Pokémon to do it.  Unlike all the stuff we’ve seen Rotom inhabit before, this next-generation Pokédex is actually designed to have a Rotom in it.  Does it still work without one?  The trailer seems to imply that it either doesn’t work at all, or operates at diminished capacity.  What does that say about what Rotom does while inside an appliance?  Can it increase the efficiency of other machines?  Does a fridge with a Rotom in it keep things cool more effectively than a normal fridge?  If the Pokédex isn’t complete without a Rotom, how do they sustain production?  Do they have to breed Rotom, or are they simply not able to make many of these things?  Can Rotom battle in this shape, and if so, what abilities does it confer?  And apparently the Pokédex allows Rotom to talk – that’s a pretty neat perk.  What will its thoughts be on the whole thing?  Does Rotom actually know everything in the Pokédex, or can it just display that information for the player?  Lots to play with there.

Anonymous asks:

The thing about the pika-clones is that Gamefreak has stopped trying to use them to recapture pikachu’s popularity and seems to now be making them just for the sake of tradition, just like the generic birds and rodents. But at least diggersby and talonflame have had multi-dimensional designs, cool new elements, and awesome hidden abilities to make up for their low stats. So if Gen 7 has a new electric rodent, do you think gamefreak could do the same and make it actually interesting and useful?

Okay well first of all I don’t think VII having a new Electric rodent is an “if.”  And certainly they could, and I hope they will.  I agree that Diggersby and Talonflame (and I suppose to a lesser extent even Vivillon, I will grudgingly admit) prove that there’s scope for cleverness even within the “templates.”  Emolga, I thought, was a good start, though Dedenne was a rather depressing return to form.  And I suppose one could argue that Se Jun Park’s famously creative use of Pachirisu in the 2014 world championship gives them some justification for continuing to include Pokémon that demand a very… unconventional strategic approach, though not much (I believe we are still waiting on such championship-level breakthroughs for Farfetch’d, Delibird, Kricketune, Phione, Girafarig… you know, I’m just not going to list them).  They may by this point actually regard competitive uselessness as an essential part of the template.  So of course they could; that doesn’t mean they will.

thephilosophicalsheep asks:

All right; so in gen 6, gamefreak made obscure competitive phenomena like EVs and egg moves more accessible to younger players with additions such as super training and the DexNav. Now what I want them to do is encourage their use by allowing NPCs the same benefits. Rarely in the pokemon games do you even see in-game trainers using ITEMS. That needs to change. I want to see Sun and Moon trainers with EV-trained, egg-moved, battle-equipped mons. That’ll better prepare kids for competitive, no?

Mmm… well, sort of?  I mean, we already have that in, for example, the Battle Maison; facilities like that have used all of those things for ages.  And to be honest I’m kind of happy with that, as a step up in difficulty from what we see during the story portion of the games.  I don’t want to throw all of this $#!t at you from the start; that’s just bloody overwhelming.  And I think the increase in transparency that comes from Super Training is much more important to introducing the EV system than having NPCs with EV-trained Pokémon would be; you can’t see EVs in battle, so ultimately that just winds up as being “everything is now harder for reasons you don’t fully understand; hahahahaha!”  The other thing there is that EV spreads for competitive movesets are often based on calculations around which Pokémon you can take down in X number of hits and which Pokémon can take you down in X number of hits, all assuming equal level and heavily informed by the current metagame, and that’s just not something that’s ever going to have any place in single player.

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