Unpopular Opinions: Scarlet & Violet Edition

[Jungle cruiser]

Sorry what was confusing about the open world?

Oh u know, people not knowing where exactly to go and thus ending up challenging gym leaders/titans/star bases they're either too underleveled or overleveled for. I had seen a lot of comments about that so I decided to mention it, tho I think I could've worded it better...

Oh well

 

[Eriorguez]

You could ask for pointers in the Pokemon Centers tho.

 

[R_N]

You could ask for pointers in the Pokemon Centers tho.

The Pokemon Centers literally just point to the nearest thing you haven't done yet.
This is actually the crux of that specific "problem", because a bunch of people beat Brassius and then the Centers near by just say to try Mela.

 

[Eriorguez]

My bad then.

 

[vampere]

Anyone else think that the gen 8 models look better than the gen 9 ones? I mean look at pult!

 

[R_N]

The slightly jaggier tail doesnt bug me too much (I think I've seen it smooth out in game) but I do like SWSH's textures on the models more yeah


The trade off being I think the new ones react to lighting better, but SWSH's colors are quite vibrant across the board in a way that SV is not since it's going for a different aesthetic.

 

[Fracterra]

Pokémon Black and White are average at best, and Scarlet and Violet are the best games in series.

 

[Fracterra]

The group dynamic between Arven, Penny, and Nemona is, I feel, somewhat overrated. I’ve seen a few posts around the web saying they’re “what Hop, Bede, and Marnie should have been,” but like… in the grand scheme of Scarlet & Violet, your three rivals barely even interact with each other outside of the final mission. I think people are mistaking them being strong individual characters that end up paired together as them having a strong group dynamic. But really, Penny and Nemona hardly even have a reason to be involved in the final storyline. I’m not going to fault Hop, Bede, and Marnie for never being shoehorned into a scene with one another just to exchange some snarky remarks about each other.

Actually, expanding on that, I feel like the writing for The Way Home is maybe some of the weakest in the game. At least up until the very end. The stuff with the AI professor and their relationship to Arven, that’s all good. But when you’re adventuring through Area Zero, why do Arven and Nemona’s IQs take a plunge? How did Arven manage to confuse “research stations” for “radish rations”? Why is Nemona like 10x ditzier than she ever was during the rest of the game? Penny at least gets to be sarcastic about the whole affair, but that running commentary is all she contributes besides turning on a lightswitch (we really needed a STEM track hacker genius to handle that).



I don’t really follow your logic here. Tinkaton’s hammer isn’t made of Corviknight metal, it’s made of metal from stuff like Pawniard and Bisharp (see Tinkatuff’s Scarlet Pokédex entry). And in any case, Shiny Tinkaton’s hammer is bronze, which doesn’t correspond to the Shiny colorations of Pawniard, Bisharp, or Corviknight, so I doubt they had any kind of “lore” in mind when determining that.

Thats because it likely is made out of shiny Revavroom, that has been worn by the desert winds, losing its shiny gold, making it look bronze

 

[Fracterra]

See the part that bothers me is going Quadruped to Bipedal. If Sprigatito had stood one 2 legs from the outset I don't think nearly as many people would give a shit.

I don’t like them getting overly genderdized

 

[R_N]

Fracterra you know you can just edit your posts or queue up multiple quotes at once in the reply box right

 

[Fracterra]

So how's the taste of boot?

But seriously, there is so much wrong with this. Even if Game Freak stopped making Pokémon games, they would still make an insane amount of money from merchandise as long as we're alive, as that's where the vast majority of the money comes from. Charizard, Pikachu, and Eevee sell well enough, there's no need for new Pokémon every three years. All the games clearly reuse a lot of code, so no they don't have to code "1000+ Pokémon" every single time. Also, "best graphics feasable for the time"? Don't make me laugh. Also, that's a big strawman of people who don't like Dexit, it's easy to make it sound silly by focusing on one Pokémon, but when hundreds are missing it's easy to see why people are upset, especially when features such as graphics, online play, etc. are not improved nearly enough to compensate. You can appeal to the poor Japanese workers all you want, but by shutting down all criticism, you are defending this system. Scarlet and Violet is a mess that is so buggy that Sonic Boom laughs at it, has online play that would have been seen as lackluster in the 2000s, has less content than the Gen V games, and graphically looks like it could have been on the PS2. And the thing is, Pokémon is the highest grossing media franchise of all time, higher than Marvel, higher than Star Wars, so there is absolutely no excuse for this crap! Game Freak doesn't care about what they're doing because they know they'll make money either way (hell, Scarlet and Violet sold as much as Elden Ring!), and things would be much better for both the fans and the workers if they stopped, but apparently it's not enough that they're already the highest-grossing media franchise, they just need to squeeze out every last penny.

And GF has 169 employees compared to Nintendo’s, what, 6 and a half fucking thousand. There were also people working on the dlc, and on the next Pokemon game.

Fracterra you know you can just edit your posts or queue up multiple quotes at once in the reply box right

I did not know the second part

Ok after all the official mons got leaked, there's one line that pretty much captured everyone's hearts.

The tinkas! And ngl, I see why! They're pretty cute, they have a godlike type combination, they have decent performances on in game runs and competitive matches (not la creme de la creme or anything but still solid) and they're sociopaths!

This is all well and good, tho for me personally, I may or may not prefer the bread dogs...

For all tinka fan who aren't losing their minds rn

Yeah, basically I like the dachsbun line more than the tinkas. The reason for this is...well I'm not sure tbh. Maybe it's the combination of being more appealed to their designs (the tinka's hands have always been a little weird to me and fidough and dachsbun seem cuter in a way that I can't describe) and having used one to great success in my playthrough (lvl 18 play rough is still insane). Tho with that said I by no means think the tinkas are horrible. They're pretty cool, and I can see why people became obsessed with them! I just wanted to put my silly little personal preference out there.

With that said, I still stand by my opinions I put earlier in the thread, dudunsparce is still not disappointing and the bugs still aren't that annoying! (If anything lake casseroya has gotten a little less laggier for me, tho that's probably just my system idk. That or I got too used to them to the point I don't notice idk...)

We love her because she is a sociopath

I really don't think that Scarlet and Violet were released in as bad of shape as everyone says they were. It might just be me, but I've had multiple playthroughs of both games and there have been little to no noticeable bugs, glitches, or anything of the like. Some of the famous examples just seem a bit... exaggerated?

Also an honorary mention to an opinion that isn't so uncommon. THERE ARE SO MANY STORY CUTSCENES! Seriously, if you watched the WR Pokemon Scarlet Any% runs, you see that the runner has a 40 MINUTE gap between the game starting and when the runner is finally set free to go catch Flamigo. Sure, a bit of story is nice, but why is there so much??? It's honestly just too much. I don't want to mash "A" for any longer than like a minute.

And other notable open world games (Cough, Cough, Tears of the Kingdom) have much longer open endings, like, 2 and a half hour openings.

 

[Malicious Muffin]

Everyone disqualified from worlds deserved it

 

[Sultan]

Everyone disqualified from worlds deserved it

GAMEFREAK should just do the right thing and disqualify everyone from worlds, I'm pretty sure that will solve all the problems

 

[pika pal]

GAMEFREAK should just do the right thing and disqualify everyone from worlds, I'm pretty sure that will solve all the problems

Forget the Championship, Gamefreak should cancel the world while we're at it.

 

[Coronis]

Everyone disqualified from worlds deserved it

I mean I don’t think this is necessarily unpopular - if you break the rules you should be disqualified, its more people wanting the rule to be changed for the future.

 

[R_N]

I mean I don’t think this is necessarily unpopular - if you break the rules you should be disqualified, its more people wanting the rule to be changed for the future.

I dunno I saw a lot of people go they DIDNT deserve it because how can gamefreak expect people to make them legit when there's still so much cruft to work with.

Which lord knows gamefreak still needs to alleviate various factors (the tera shards are only partially better after the DLC, the pokemon availability thing is still not resolved) but does seem to bury the whole "cheating at a competition that doesnt want you cheating is playing with fire if they ever decide to crack down on cheating" thing


my opinion is: if you're going to cheat cheat better. Kurt's run down of rental teams shows people aaaaabsolutely know they just don't care to hide it even though it's so easy
And this applies to the idiots on GTS who couldn't hack a proper Legends pokemon to save their lives.

 

[Mad Ram]

I mean I don’t think this is necessarily unpopular - if you break the rules you should be disqualified, its more people wanting the rule to be changed for the future.

It is definitely a controversial opinion at least. Some part of it is legitimate gripes about how hard it can be to get certain Pokémon. Others are less legitimate and quite frankly boil down to the fact that cheating is so normalized in the VGC community that the minute there's halfway decent enforcement people cry about how unfair it is they are punished for breaking rules they agreed to. Frankly Showdown doesn't help with how easy it is to just simply simulate a mon that may as well be impossible to get. Remember how much of a common option for Chansey and Blissey was Wish? A move that you could only get in Gen 3 from a specific event? In the actual games if you need a Wish Chansey/Blissey for your team, you have to either cheat one in or just suck it up and find something else to fill that role. On Showdown, it doesn't matter. It can be legal therefore you can just put it in.

It also doesn't help that the people who are much more vocal about the cheating problem have their own issues to put it lightly. Kurt is probably the best person saying how it's a problem, but given how he's the one who made the software used to gen in the first place it makes him less credible. Add in the drama chasers we won't mention here even though we all know who they are and bad arguments from the anti-cheating side which often devolve into "cheating is wrong because cheating is wrong," it isn't surprising to see how it can be an unpopular opnion.

Really the only way I see cheating going away is if there is physically no way to do it. As much as people say it gives no advantage, it clearly does or else so many people won't do it. It cuts down the time and effort needed to build a decent team so you can spend more time actually battling as well as giving you access to mons that are otherwise to impractical to get on your own. Even if they had something you could use to lower a Pokémon's IVs or otherwise modify them to give you anything you could possibly need, genning would still be faster as you don't need to gather those resources or even catch the Pokémon to begin with.

 

[R_N]

Yeah there's never not going to be cheating, they could simplify it even more (and should, to be clear, there's really no reason for things like ability patches and HA to still be this level of annoying, PP Maxes should just be sold, tera shards should really only take 25 max and should honestly be something yo ucan freel yswap between once bought for that pokemon, IV lowering thing, the EV cleaner should have been base game and so forth) and it would still be there because unless it's literally a battle sim pokemon editor it's always going to be too much. And even if they had that you'll still have people who don't want to bother and just want someone else to do it for them.


Thus I say again: if you're going to cheat, cheat better because a properly cheated Pokemon will be indistinguishable from a normal Pokemon. Or at least have differences so imperceptible that most people won't notice. Then we can just go back to the you know we know you know we know standoff and everyone can just keep cruising along.
At least have a dedicated community cheater who hacks up on all the needed items or something.

 

[Worldie]

Thus I say again: if you're going to cheat, cheat better because a properly cheated Pokemon will be indistinguishable from a normal Pokemon. Or at least have differences so imperceptible that most people won't notice. Then we can just go back to the you know we know you know we know standoff and everyone can just keep cruising along.
At least have a dedicated community cheater who hacks up on all the needed items or something.

Ironically iirc that was the main reason for the bans: people who got banned had very poorly made mons that were super easy to scoop.

There were a ton of genned mons as usual, and the properly made ones did not get punished.

I do however moderately disagree with "make everything easily accessible". Sadly it does fight with what they want to do with the games, aka keep some pseudo-liveservice to keep people playing them even after beating them.
I know how annoying it is to get ability patches and tera crystals, I hate it myself, but if they don't force you to grind / partecipate to raids, the games' online will be dead within a month outside of the actual VGC.

They would need to change design model before they can allow "easy access to competitive changing items"

 

[Coronis]

Yeah there's never not going to be cheating, they could simplify it even more (and should, to be clear, there's really no reason for things like ability patches and HA to still be this level of annoying, PP Maxes should just be sold, tera shards should really only take 25 max and should honestly be something yo ucan freel yswap between once bought for that pokemon, IV lowering thing, the EV cleaner should have been base game and so forth) and it would still be there because unless it's literally a battle sim pokemon editor it's always going to be too much. And even if they had that you'll still have people who don't want to bother and just want someone else to do it for them.


Thus I say again: if you're going to cheat, cheat better because a properly cheated Pokemon will be indistinguishable from a normal Pokemon. Or at least have differences so imperceptible that most people won't notice. Then we can just go back to the you know we know you know we know standoff and everyone can just keep cruising along.
At least have a dedicated community cheater who hacks up on all the needed items or something.

Glimmering Charm really mitigates this.

 

[R_N]

Ironically iirc that was the main reason for the bans: people who got banned had very poorly made mons that were super easy to scoop.

There were a ton of genned mons as usual, and the properly made ones did not get punished.

Which is why I keep saying cheat better! Look at your better cheating peers!

I do however moderately disagree with "make everything easily accessible". Sadly it does fight with what they want to do with the games, aka keep some pseudo-liveservice to keep people playing them even after beating them.
I know how annoying it is to get ability patches and tera crystals, I hate it myself, but if they don't force you to grind / partecipate to raids, the games' online will be dead within a month outside of the actual VGC.

They would need to change design model before they can allow "easy access to competitive changing items"

You can absolutely do both "make things easily accessible" and "pseudo-live service"

Like Ability Patches. You can make those a 5 or 10% drop easy and it would immediately be better while still needing you on The Grind
25 tera shards still takes time especially if you want to keep swapping them across your team
There's 0 reason you can't buy PP Maxes, it's just convenience. Honestly same for gold bottle caps too. The ones they sell at the auction house are just a scam compared to buying the bottle caps you need.
Everything still costs money which you have to earn

and so on.

 

[Mad Ram]

TBH a problem is you have people who claim that they absolutely don't cheat or offload responsibility by saying they have friends to "catch" them which creates a false impression for some people that cheating is less of a problem than it actually is. If you're actually involved, you know it's omni present. If you aren't, it's in people's best interest to keep it hidden because shockingly TPC might not be too happy when prominent VGC voices are telling people to break the rules or that they might do it themselves. This only makes it harder for people who are just getting in because they might not be aware that the reason they are too slow to adapt to meta trends or that they can't seem to get the exact right stats for their mons that everyone else seems to have is because they just genned them.

I do however moderately disagree with "make everything easily accessible". Sadly it does fight with what they want to do with the games, aka keep some pseudo-liveservice to keep people playing them even after beating them.
I know how annoying it is to get ability patches and tera crystals, I hate it myself, but if they don't force you to grind / partecipate to raids, the games' online will be dead within a month outside of the actual VGC.

On the one hand I can understand wanting to not have it so that everything is given to you with no challenge, but on the other hand reducing grinding is generally a good thing. To borrow a phrase, complaining about making the grind easier is like complaining about empty traffic. Besides, people will still do raids for other reasons. I mean not everyone goes into the game wanting to be some VGC champ.

 

[Bakugames]

calling nemona xenophobic or racist is dumb as hell. if i thought my town was becoming some tourist trap for people who didnt respect my culture id beat them with rocks. if they were spanish id beat them with hammers

 

[R_N]

calling nemona xenophobic or racist is dumb as hell. if i thought my town was becoming some tourist trap for people who didnt respect my culture id beat them with rocks. if they were spanish id beat them with hammers

I assume you mean Carmine

Also I guess I shouldn't be surprised people feel that way about her. But even ignoring the valid feelings she's also, like, what. 17? 18 tops? Honestly probably even 16 but with a big ego. It's fine for her to be overprotective about the place you love (hm weird almost like this is a character flaw that applies to the rest of her life well anyway--).
Especially when by the end she realizes she overreacted!





It is very funny that the Caretaker is absolutely trying to turn it into a tourist trap though lmfao. he lets it slip in the post game

 

[Bakugames]

assume you mean Carmine

oooh im dumb as hell. id edit it but its funnier to let it up

But even ignoring the valid feelings she's also, like, what. 17? 18 tops? Honestly probably even 16 but with a big ego. It's fine for her to be overprotective about the place you love (hm weird almost like this is a character flaw that applies to the rest of her life well anyway--).
Especially when by the end she realizes she overreacted!

pokemon fans have this issue of constantly going grrr grrr why is there no mean rivals anymore, why is everyone so nice, but as soon as we get protags that have a bit of nuance theyre all bad people or something. with carmine its not as prevalent because she made a quick 180 but even then, having to see ppl say shes xenophobic or abusive to kieran (????????) over the most basic teenager characterization made me realize pokemon fans only want very shallow mean rivals and evil teams. which is kinda lame