Pokemon is a series that’s had it’s fair share of development problems. But I think none are more interesting than the topic of what Pokemon are included in each mainline game.
Sooner or later, we would have to confront the possibility that not every Pokemon could be in the new mainline games. But to a lot of people, it happened sooner than they would have thought.
So what’s the future? In this video, I hope to address that, and in the process, offer a point of view to all the #BringBackNationalDex-ers to show the other side of the story…
Transcript:
Pokemon is a series about expressing yourself. The way you build your team is a form of self-expression. Do you value strength and go for the highest possible stats? Or do you just go with Pokemon you think are cute, without even thinking about stats?
And something I don’t think the games get enough credit for, is that you can do both. The mainline games are often admonished for being “too easy”, but one of the side-effects of that, is that any team is viable. I’m sure you could beat most of the games with a team of 6 level 100 Metapod.
That type of game-design is reflected in the Pokemon world. In-universe, not everyone would be trying to become the Champion of that region. Some people would be content just hanging out with their Furret. Would you fly through the sky with your Charizard? Or would you use your Alakazam to levitate Cheetos into your mouth to avoid cheesy fingers?
That’s the beauty of the Pokemon games. You’re encouraged to think about what you would do if you lived in the Kanto, Sinnoh, whatever region.
But let’s take a step back and think of them as games. The first generation took the world by storm. Everyone’s talking about their favorite Pokemon or the gym leader that gave them the hardest time.
Then the second generation rolls around. I think the logical conclusion would be to start from scratch for a sequel to the first games. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, both insanely popular JRPGs at the time, were known for having a new world, new characters, and new mechanics with each new game.
GameFreak definitely made a new game. But they also included every single Pokemon from the last game. Instead of being able to catch 150, now you could catch 250. That’s 100 new Pokemon for you to fall in love with, but if you really loved Butterfree, you could raise one in the new game.
They end up doing the same with the third generation of games. New story, characters, and region, but all the old Pokemon are still available.
And thus, a dangerous precedent is set. Players are going to expect every single Pokemon from previous generations in each new game.
I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation either. Each generation since the second has added new Pokemon while keeping the old ones around to pad out the Pokedex. It would be weird for them to just up and decide to make all older Pokemon unobtainable in the newest mainline game.
But what happens when ambition is held back by technology? It’s one thing to say, “Yeah, let’s include all 900 or so older Pokemon in the next game in addition to the 100+ new ones”; implementing them is a different story…
There’s all kinds of things that need to be considered when including a new Pokemon. Models, animations, Pokedex entries, battle mechanics, and a ton of other stuff I’m likely forgetting.
In 2d, there was less to worry about, but there was still a lot. Sprites are a lot less flexible than models and can only be used for specific instances. This is probably the reason we never saw follower Pokemon in the 2d games since Heart Gold and Soul Silver. They couldn’t reuse the battle sprites, they would have had to make a handful of new sprites for hundreds of Pokemon.
And here’s the kicker. If there’s one thing I want you to pull from this video at all, it’s this:
This was bound to happen from the beginning.
The instant they decided to include the Generation 1 Pokemon into Generation 2, they lit the fuse on a bomb that was going to go off sooner or later. Every time they release a new mainline game and introduce 100 Pokemon or so, that’s 100 more Pokemon they’re committing to include and support in future games.
100 more Pokemon to program moves for, 100 more Pokemon to give a dozen animations each, 100 more Pokemon to take away time that could be spent polishing other newer Pokemon.
That’s the biggest part in my eyes. Each new Pokemon made takes away development time that could be spent polishing other Pokemon.
Imagine if they spent their development time polishing a small amount of Pokemon compared to the full 900. Imagine all the depth they could give to each Pokemon if that were the case. But. I’ll get to that later.
For now, let’s look at the possible solutions to this problem. That being: “How do you develop a Pokemon game without breaking the bank?”
We saw them experimenting with solutions to this as early as the Nintendo 64. HAL Laboratory developed both Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Stadium for the system. They provided interesting workarounds to the workload that comes with developing a Pokemon game.
Both games are hyper-specific in their scope.
Let’s think about the model and animation work they had to do for each game, and compare it to a hypothetical mainline 3d Pokemon game for the Nintendo 64.
Pokemon Snap only needed models for the environments and Pokemon. Same with Stadium. Generation 3 on the Nintendo 64 would have required models for environments and Pokemon as well, but there’d have to be a hell of a lot more environments. Think of how many routes and towns there are in a traditional Pokemon game, the amount of work that would have to go into making each town and route distinctive would just not be possible with the storage space available on the N64.
But it doesn’t just need environments. It needs humans. The 2d games got away with a handful of sprites to represent the people of a region, but reusing models so frequently would break a player’s immersion pretty quickly in 3d.
And don’t even get me started on battles. Pokemon battles in this Gen3 Nintendo 64 game would not be comparable in any way to what we saw in Stadium and Stadium 2.
The Stadium games had the benefit of being ONLY about battles. The only model and environment work that had to be done outside of the Pokemon was the Stadiums themselves. They didn’t have to do any narrative work or plan out a whole region. They could just focus on one aspect of the Pokemon series. If they had to do everything that a mainline game would have, the visual depth of the battles would take a massive hit compared to what was in Stadium.
For mainline games, that leads me to the conclusion that not every Pokemon should be included.
Think about it. Think about how much time and money could be spent on things like environments and new gameplay systems if they committed to only doing a 1/4th or even 1/2 of all Pokemon. Think of how visually stunning the environments could get and how intricate the Pokemon animations would be…
Uhh… I guess that leads into discussion of Pokemon Sword and Shield.
They took the route of cutting out half the Pokemon in existence to polish a smaller number of Pokemon.
Purely from an optics perspective, it was rough. User reviews of Sword and Shield on Metacritic hover around 4.5, while previous mainline games were in the 7-8 range. Critical reviews weren’t nearly as negative, but they were slightly below the average for a mainline Pokemon.
I think the user reviews are more interesting though. It’s representative of the public discourse around the games. People are still upset that they cut half the Pokemon from the new game.
Broadly, I think the Pokedex culling was a flash-point for the series. There was always some criticism about how mainline Pokemon games didn’t like to rock the boat and how quickly they’d abandon cool mechanics like follower Pokemon. But with the removal of 400+ Pokemon, people had something to latch onto. When you choose such a wide pool of Pokemon to cut, you’re bound to cut a bunch of people’s favorite Pokemon. It became popular to hate on the direction the series went.
But how did it turn out? GameFreak was talking about how cutting that many Pokemon would allow them to really focus on the creatures that they are including and give them depth unseen in the mainline games before.
Unfortunately, answers like this don’t come so easily. There’s no way we can know what amount of the budget that would have gone to including those 400+ Pokemon and what that would have affected in the final game. But also, there’s some aspects that just don’t make sense considering how much they hyped up how polished it was gonna be.
Obviously, I have to talk about the trees. They’re rough. I think you could make an argument for the trees in Ocarina of Time looking better.
And the battle animations, they’re just like all the older games. Battles don’t feel any more lively than they did in Sun and Moon or even in the 2d games. Pokemon games are still in a place where a kick is represented by a tiny hop. The animation principles in use in Sword and Shield go all the way back to the first few games. A Pokemon’s model or sprite has limited movement and the majority of the visual flair comes from whatever particles or distortions are specific to that move.
The biggest immersion breakers happened to me during the story. I think a majority of my problems with this come from the lack of voice-acting.
There’ll be moments where it shows a close-up of someone talking, but no words are coming out. It makes sense not to do that for a sprite based game, and it didn’t even feel too weird in the 3ds games. If I’m remembering correctly, characters face’s would be stuck in one position while a line of dialog is presented. But in Sword and Shield, most characters have their mouths animated when they’re talking. So there’s a disconnect in that you see their mouths moving and you expect to hear words, but it’s just silent.
It gets even weirder with Piers. He’s one of my favorite characters in the game, I love his personality and the writing surrounding him. I especially love the sections where he just starts singing. But as soon as he starts singing, I’m immediately taken out of the scene because he’s not actually singing. He’s just moving his mouth around. It’s like he’s lip-syncing but they forgot to use the vocal version of the track, so it’s just the music.
If they had used the money and time saved from not including 400+ Pokemon to implement voice acting, I think a lot of people would feel better about the games.
There’d be an immediate thing you could point to that was influenced by a reduced scope in Pokemon.
“Oh they took out half of all Pokemon to implement voice-acting, a first for the mainline series.”
But that isn’t what they did. What can you point to as a positive inclusion of reduced Pokemon scope?
Pokemon Camp? I mean, it’s cool and all. But there was Pokemon Amie in X and Y, so it’s not like hanging out with your Pokemon is a ground-breaking addition.
The Wild Area is cool. It’s genuinely an impressive step forward for the series, and it was really cool to see both DLCs adopt the open-world design of the Wild Area.
But here’s where it gets tricky. That space would have been routes if the Wild Area didn’t exist. Routes are in every Pokemon game, so in my mind, they just substituted a handful of routes for a single wide-open route. I guess that begs the question, is the production of 7-9 routes equal to the production of the singular Wild Area in Sword and Shield?
I don’t think anyone that isn’t a part of GameFreak can truly say. It’d just be speculation.
And that’s what this all comes down to. We don’t know how much money they saved by only having to implement half of all Pokemon in Sword and Shield and what they allocated that money towards. Saying stuff like, “Oh they cut 400 Pokemon but couldn’t even make a high resolution tree texture? Buncha lazy amateurs” doesn’t sit right with me. Once we get to the point of assuming that they didn’t implement all those Pokemon because they’re lazy is when we start to look like idiots who don’t know anything about game development.
Game development is all about managing scope. At some point in the process, some developer or producer looked at that tree and said “Good enough”. That’s not a slight against them. The greatest games ever made were put together by people saying “Good enough” at opportune times. The texture artists just have to cut their losses at a certain point and move on to more important things like character models or outfits.
I can’t deny that a lot of battle animations are distractingly simple though. There are aspects of Sword and Shield that I wish were better. But I’m willing to acknowledge that if the other 400 Pokemon were included, that the polish would be even worse.
Now consider this: Sword and Shield are the best-selling games in the franchise.
Yeah.
No amount of twitter replies talking about #BringBackNationalDex is gonna mean anything if the game still sells like hotcakes. And I’d be willing to bet like 80% of the people that played the game didn’t even notice the weird trees or simplistic battle animations.
And I can’t even fault them for that. Hell, I didn’t even really think critically about the battle animations until I started planning out this video. They’re fine. That’s all I can say. They are bare-bones enough to allow the player’s mind to fill in the blanks of what’s supposed to be happening.
The trees? They just blended into the background after the initial, “Oh it’s the trees everyone was talking about. Man those look bad”. I stopped paying attention to them. None of the other textures in the game are as bad as the trees, at least to my recollection, so the texture work is at least acceptable across the board.
If I’m being honest, it seems like the had their priorities straight for the most part. Nothing outside of the lack of voice-acting completely broke my immersion. With some time and a bit more money, I can imagine Generation 9 is turning out even better. I’m excited for Gen 9.
But is that expectation justified? What direction is GameFreak heading post Sword and Shield?
Their two big games on the horizon are the Pokemon Diamond and Pearl Remakes and Pokemon Legends: Arceus.
I don’t expect Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl to rock the boat too much. I have a feeling there aren’t gonna be any Pokemon in that game past Generation 4. If we see Pokemon from Generation 5 to 8, I will be genuinely surprised.
I do think it’s interesting that it has a fully pulled back camera similar to what the series looked like before X and Y. Once those games came out, the camera was a lot closer to the player character and models were actually proportioned somewhat realistically. I would have expected a “Let’s Go” style game, but I’m glad I was proven wrong.
The more interesting discussion surrounds Pokemon Legends: Arceus. It’s seemingly the full realization of the “Pokemon, but Breath of the Wild” idea that people were throwing around a few years ago. It feels like GameFreak actually listened to what people were asking for.
And I’m pretty excited. Sword and Shield featured a little open-world experiment with the Wild Area, then the DLCs were wholly open Wild Areas, this feels like the logical progression of what they’ve been working towards.
They’ve only shown off the game once so far, so there’s not a whole lot that we know. But I think it’s safe to assume that not all 900+ Pokemon are gonna be in the game. This takes places specifically in the Sinnoh region, so the majority of Pokemon we’re gonna see are probably gonna be native to Sinnoh.
But of course, they’re gonna pull Pokemon from other regions. I like that the starters are all pulled from different generations, people are so used to picking their starter in gen 2 or gen 5, but its neat that they mixed it up a bit.
Unfortunately, the trailer visually looked pretty rough. The textures were awful and the framerate on not-too-distant Pokemon were shockingly low. I can only hope it improves before it’s release in 2022. But if Sword and Shield are anything to go by, we can expect a bit of jank.
Okay, that’s cool and all. But those are spin-offs. What about Generation 9?
I genuinely don’t know. I can’t even say for sure that we’ll see another mainline Pokemon game like Sword and Shield and Sun and Moon. They might just put out a single new game with a new region and new Pokemon and skip the double-release they’ve always done. Although now that I’ve said that, I can’t imagine them wanting to go back on a series tradition started with the first game. And missing out on money from double dippers.
Will the next game with 100 new Pokemon feature all 900 Pokemon before it? If I were a betting man, I’d guess no. I’m sure they could theoretically put over 1000 Pokemon in one game, but this is a band-aid they need to rip off sooner or later. They already ripped most of it off with Sword and Shield. I guess the question is if they try and put that band-aid back on, only to have to rip it off in Generation 11 or 12 and go through all this again.
Because I know we aren’t going to hit Generation 18 and have 2200 Pokemon in the National Dex. That’s where it starts to get unfeasible to manage. Both from the perspective of making them and storing them on a drive.
What I can say for sure, is that generations as we’ve always known them are gone. Generations in the past usually meant 2 new games in a new engine, sometimes a third new game, and remakes of previous games using the new engine.
But we aren’t seeing that anymore. Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee play nothing like Sun and Moon, at least if we’re comparing them to how similar Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire were to Fire Red and Leaf Green.
And that divide is widened even further with Legends: Arceus and Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.
Breaking news, I literally just realized as I’m writing this that the game is called “Pokemon Legends colon Arceus”. Does that mean this is the beginning of a spin-off series that’ll touch on the history of other regions in this open-world style? Maybe, who the hell knows. Definitely not me.
The Pokemon series is in a unique place for sure. Nobody knows what direction the mainline games are gonna take, probably not even GameFreak.
Whichever direction they head in, they’re gonna need to figure out a smart solution to the Pokemon workload problem. Sword and Shield showed that people aren’t willing to give up the Pokemon they love without a fight.
Will the next mainline game go back to including all Pokemon? Or will they do another Sword-and-Shield and only include a fraction of the existing ones?
I don’t think anyone knows. Either way, I hope they find a solution to the ticking time bomb that is Pokemon…
Thanks for watching. I recently played Pokemon Sword, and I wasn’t planning on doing a video about it, but I thought I might have some interesting stuff to say about the direction of the series going forward. I’ve actually started writing reviews for games, movies, shows, whatever that I upload exclusive to Patreon. I put a short review of Pokemon Sword and Crystal Clear up there somewhat recently. Support me at any tier, I don’t give a care. Any support helps. Although if you don’t wanna do that, a subscription is cool…
Duhhhh… thanks for listening to me babble and I’ll see you on the flip.