u/Lanky-Background8516

Plz, hear me out real quick, I understand this is a bit of a hot take but bear with me. I’ve been playing Legends ZA recently, and while it’s more fast paced than traditional turn based combat, I just didn’t jive with it as much. Now I know there are fans that like this new combat system and all the power to you, it’s just not for me.

So then I tried turning on my old DS and GBA games and tried understanding what it was that made them feel more memorable for me. And that’s when I replayed Emerald’s battle frontier and I realized why I preferred the old turn based combat system, and why both the old and new turn based games have this fundamental problem.

It’s not that the turn based battle mechanics are too easy, at least for me, it’s that the rest of the main story in most of the games doesn’t fully utilize the mechanics in the way the battle frontier does. When playing through the main story of older and newer games, I rarely had to consider elements of the battle system beyond things like level, type matchups, stat buffs/debuffs or certain abilities. If I had a particular problem with a gym leader or main story fight, I could just overlevel my Pokemon and brute force my way through it. It wasn’t until the battle frontier that I had to deeply consider things like abilities, held items/berries, EV/IV’s, status conditions or even special moves like skill swap or trick room.

Pokémon’s turn based system has had this level of complexity and nuance since at least generation 3, the rest of the game’s solo campaign just didn’t evolve along with it. I think a possible way to remedy this is to treat more trainer battles, and particularly main story battles like puzzle boxes the players have to solve. And these puzzles get progressively harder as the story moves on. These “puzzle box” fights would have trainers using specific kinds of strategy that the player either has to learn or even counter, whether it’s a team that is focused on using weather effects, a team that tries to do a battle of attrition with status effects and a wall, a team that maybe uses baton pass to buff a sweeper, or a team that incorporates abilities and or held items to affect the battle.

Now not all trainer battles on regular routes or in special areas have to be like this, but maybe have a percentage of regular trainer battles have a specific team strategy/composition so that players have to figure out how to beat them, and the amount of these types of battles and their difficulty increases throughout the adventure. Gym Leaders could work as checkpoints for the players puzzle solving skills, where maybe in the road leading up to each gym certain trainer battles utilize the same tactics but on an easier scale, and rival/evil team battles do something similar but with more diverse teams. And the Elite 4/Champion would work as a final test for the players becoming intimately familiar with the battle mechanics since they’ve been learning it for the whole game. Maybe even the legendary Pokemon battles could work in a similar way.

All this to say, I understand that some fans think the battle system is too easy, but I believe the fundamental issue isn’t with the core system, it’s with the solo campaign that is built around it. I truly think that if the main story fully integrated the hidden complexity of the battle system with its progression, the core gameplay loop would hit a new level.

What do people think about future games adopting a level scaling feature mixed with a level cap for story checkpoints (mainly gyms but maybe major story beats too)? For example, perhaps between gyms there is a level cap so that your team's max levels are capped to the strongest pokemon on the gym leader's team? And further levels are unlocked once you obtain the badge. And in place of exp, pokemon at the max level cap instead earn extra EV or something so players can still use them if they want to?

And between gyms, wild pokemon and regular trainer battles are scaled to the level that is equal to the average of your team's levels? With story battles being at a set level close to your current level cap. And to prevent players from abusing that system to have easier fights, the average level that is calculated is only taken from team members that collectively have levels within a certain range and must include the highest level pokemon on the team. So for instance, if a player has a team that has the range of levels being (1, 13, 33, 37, 35), it would calculate the level of the wild pokemon/regular trainer encounter from the players pokemon that are level 33, 35 and 37 and assign the opponents level to be averaged from those last three levels?

Is this system too convoluted or complex to adequately input? I think this could be an idea to give the player a challenge from an exp level standpoint but also not be too daunting for newer fans to the series. So you can have battles that provide an adequate challenge for both sides of the fence. Any thoughts on whether this would be a good idea, and what could be useful things to adjust to make it possibly better?

At lot of my first Pokemon games were from Gens 1-5, and it is those games that started my love for metroidvania style world design. I love seeing something I can’t access yet and coming back to it to find whatever secrets lay behind the obstacle, especially if it’s good, or even finding a pathway to an earlier section of the game like Diglett tunnel or exploring mount coronet in gen 4. However, in a lot of retrospectives of the older games, and especially in gen 4, I see a lot of fans who didn’t like how HM’s were utilized, especially bc you often had to change out a party member to accommodate for certain obstacles. And particularly a good number of them praise later titles like Sun and Moon for the ride mechanic that removed HM’s, which honestly I’m not as big a fan of as they don’t feel as engaging as the old system did, especially when you had to solve puzzles in areas like the Seafoam lslands or make your way through gauntlets with moves like Flash to light your way. HM moves weren’t perfect, but I’m not sure if they’re as bad as some fans describe. If I had one criticism for HM moves, it’s that some like Flash, Cut or Defog felt like they didn’t have as good battle utility compared to the more OP ones like Fly or Surf. So I’m just trying to understand what about HM’s in the old games were so terrible to some fans, as I’d honestly prefer HM’s to S/M’s ride Pokemon or Sw/Sh bike upgrades.

This is more to do with the Jar that contains the hallucinogenic drug that poisons the City of Brass’s water. So I get why it’s dangerous in anyone’s hands, but why would Marlowe and her colleagues want it, especially bc they already have a drug that makes people do what they want for a time? Especially bc the drug in the jar makes people less predictable and more violent while under its influence. Did they just not know what it did, or do they consider it a superior version to what they use? Or was there something I missed?