Personally speaking, I consider having a meta in a game like Pokemon so centralized that there are only 21 unique mons amongst the Top 10 teams is pretty damning in itself. This is, like, Leroy in Tekken 7 levels of saturation, and yet the culture with VGC seems to consider this acceptable.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
I know Iron Hands’ a powerful threat in VGC but…
WHAT.
I mean, it’s one thing to make a physical Electric-type Pokémon to work in VGC. But it’s another to be one of the best of the format despite having no effective Ability thanks to Pincurchin being useless and Miraidon not available!
Imagine the terror it and Iron Bundle will cause once Miraidon will enter the scene. Same for Flutter Mane once Koraidon or Groudon becomes allowed.
There is still the ability booster who works like a Choice item without being locked ? (Few switch in VGC)
If you don’t already know, booster energy is only a 1.3x multiplier for everything except speed which is 1.5
There is, but large majority of IH use AV in order to tank a hit from Flutter Mane and 1hko with Heavy Slam.
Plus it's a pokemon you tend to shuffle a lot (having access to both Fake out and Volt switch, and being victim of intimidate) so the one time booster energy doesnt work well (it's mainly used on Bundle instead and occasionally on Fluttermane)
The thing is, less threats = less things to prepare for. It's easier to teambuild when there are a limited amount of pokemon you have to account for.
Isn't one of the current issue of OU specifically the fact that you have so many threats to prepare for that it's a nightmare to cover everything ?
I forgot :o (To my defense, I only use Speed Boost ;))
My counterargument is that it takes out a lot out of the actual art of Pokemon's design when everyone is just running the same teams over and over. Rather than designing a strong team that you enjoy using, the game (and I stress this is my opinion) devolves into a glorified chess match that punishes you for player expression. Not to mention it gets very boring, since you usually just fight people with the exact same teams and thus strategies, over and over.
I don't think you have played / watched a lot of competitive games do you.
Whenever we are looking at mobas like League or Dota, fighting games like Smash or SF, or even card games like YGO or Pokemon itself, people play to win.
People will use the best of the best to give themselves the best chances, so people will always gravitate toward the best 20 champions, the best 20 pokemon, the best deck archetypes, the highest tier fighter etc.
You will have the odd ball like the person bringing Blue Eyes in a Tearlament meta, or Garen picked during play in (and winning all matches cause noone knows how to play against it), or the Jigglypuff otp in smash, etc etc, but high level metas will always be somewhat centralized around the top tiers and what is strong against the toptiers.
Noone wants to gamble their prize money on matchup fishing. Noone wants to lose a million dollars because they ended up counterteamed in the finals with 0 chance of winning due to the meta being too complex.
While it may (and does) result in a less interesting viewer experience, a centralized meta is a stable meta.
My understanding of the tabletop wargaming sphere is that overcentralized metas effectively devolve into rock-paper-sicssors between top builds, pretty much the opposite of not fishing for matchups. To use the (recently addressed) state of Star Wars Armada as an example: Anakin is considered the best commander around, with good reason. Most non-Anakin builds seriously struggle against him. Sloane, while not a low-tier by any means, has many more weaknesses but is also perfectly suited to defeating Anakin. The third category is thus any other commander at a given tournament: capable of beating Sloane but not Anakin. The end result is that everybody just picks one of the three options and hopes to not have many bad matchups. The serious players don't like it because getting through the tournament feels luck-based, and the spectators don't like it because low diversity isn't interesting to watch.
Yes, but this is Pokemon we're talking about, not a 1v1 game. You have 6 pokemon in your team, with the added flexibility of VGC being "bring 4 out of 6", which does give you a lot of leeway on how you build.
Pretty much every team structure will have some combination of the top 15 or so pokemon + 1 or 2 niche picks that work well or against them, obviously, but that's far from a stale meta as long as multiple archetypes are viable.
This isn't CHALK where if 5 of your 6 weren't the predetermined top mons, you were by default at a massive disadvantage and basically playing hoping your opponent misplayed.
Unpopular Opinion of mine followed by a quote response/follow-up.
Legends Unova is a fun idea for the story/world to explore, but making an "ancient Unova" fun to play is borderline impossible without a massive Geography overhaul compared to Sinnoh. Unova's Region design is based heavily on its cities while not having a great deal to work with for geographical setpieces: you have Chargestone Cave, Twist Mountain, and Dragonspiral Tower, which are all concentrated on the West side of the Region compared to Sinnoh having a more centered Mt. Coronet or a hypothetical Johto game probably basing in Mahogany Town with the Towers (whether or not the historic Fire occurs during the story in question.)
It reminds me a bit of RBY OU, where Tauros is required and Snorlax/Chansey are so good that you're probably kneecapping without them 98% of the time: you can get diversity in other sets but playing optimally inevitably locks some things in.
Legends Unova is a fun idea for the story/world to explore, but making an "ancient Unova" fun to play is borderline impossible without a massive Geography overhaul compared to Sinnoh. Unova's Region design is based heavily on its cities while not having a great deal to work with for geographical setpieces: you have Chargestone Cave, Twist Mountain, and Dragonspiral Tower, which are all concentrated on the West side of the Region compared to Sinnoh having a more centered Mt. Coronet or a hypothetical Johto game probably basing in Mahogany Town with the Towers (whether or not the historic Fire occurs during the story in question.)
Also if I recall, CHALK in at least some regionals/one year Worlds did become more of a blueprint than a hard-set Core. Like I recall one or two teams that would sub things like Amoongus for Aegislash as a different Resist Profile or Cresselia for Sylveon, with Landorus-T being the only Pokemon you literally always saw because a Fighting Resistant Intimidator with two of the best VGC spread moves is too perfect in that era of VGC to pass-up.
It reminds me a bit of RBY OU, where Tauros is required and Snorlax/Chansey are so good that you're probably kneecapping without them 98% of the time: you can get diversity in other sets but playing optimally inevitably locks some things in.
Yung Dramps
awesome gaming
It's cool to think about the game design perspective when talking old region revisits but I'm not sure if I entirely agree with this line of thought. You've ommitted quite a few non-natural landmarks from your assessment, most notably Relic Castle and Abyssal Ruin which feel ready-made for some sort of expansion depending on how far back a hypothetical Legends Unova would be. There's also Reversal Mountain, which fulfills the role of natural spot on the eastern side of the region.
I do think other regions are better for this format for similar reasons to what you've described, but I would hardly call a Legends Unova "borderline impossible without a massive geographical overhaul"
Not to mention LA has Sinnoh completely morphed and weirdly a separate island despite Shinjoh Ruin's connection to Johto and Sinnoh's Radio tower being connected to Johto's
Clearly the presence of Groudon just increases/decreases the speed of geologic events. e.g island/continent formation
QuentinQuonce
formerly green_typhlosion
Wait, what?
Also the Sinjoh Ruins aren't in either Johto or Sinnoh. The player gets teleported there.
Not literally, but the Rocket takeover in Johto is directly broadcast in DPP. Given the game's general Johto refs + crossevos you'd assume the regions are near each other
But LA shows otherwise
CHALK?
Sinnoh is based on Hokkaido, Johto is based on the southern part of the main island. Sinnoh was always a stand alone island.
QuentinQuonce
formerly green_typhlosion
I don't remember the takeover being broadcast in DPP. When does that happen?
Also Sinnoh is directly stated to be to the north of Johto in HGSS, which fits with the real-world geography of the regions they're based on. The Sinjoh Ruins are said to be where people from the two regions met, so would be somewhere in between, not in either region.
EDIT: ninja'd, dammit!
QuentinQuonce
formerly green_typhlosion
I think there'd be a massive overhaul to the geography no matter what region was used, so I don't think an ancient Unova is so out of the question.
The geography of each region is never completely the same between games anyway; Unova changes shape slightly between BW and B2W2, and Kanto is wildly different in all of its various portrayals. Hell, between BW and B2W2 there's landslides, volcanic eruptions, and a whole load of urban development so I can absolutely accept more major geographic shifts over hundreds of years.
Also, Unova is full of ruins, so depending on how far back you go you've got a bunch of towns/cities anyway. There's the Relic Castle, and White 2 also has ruins uncovered beneath Route 4, so you've got a settlement more or less where Castelia is in the present. There's the Abyssal Ruins, and I could definitely envisage small towns/villages where there'll later be cities for Opelucid, Accumula, and Driftveil.
And ancient Unova should be more natural and less urban than the present-day region. Perhaps Lostlorn Forest was bigger and more sprawling back in the day; there's also the forest the Swords of Justice lived in. It'd be interesting to see a younger, more rustic version of Lacunosa Town that didn't have the modern traditions of everyone hiding indoors at night. The Pokemon League is an old temple so it'd be cool if that was a location, and you could do something with the Entralink too.
CHALK was a extremely popular archetype during gen 6, to the point where iirc the top 8 teams at worlds that year were almost all identical, as by not playing CHALK (or a slight variant of CHALK with a antimeta adaptation) was basically making life harder for yourself for no reason.
By many considered the lowest point of VGC.
It consisted of Cresselia, Amoongus, Landorus-Therian, Heatran, (Mega)Kangaskhan, hence the CHALK
https://pokeventurer.blogspot.com/2015/12/chalk-analyses-better-understanding.html
Compared to even SwSh final worlds
Despite the omnipresence of Incineroar (by many considered by now the best VGC mon ever, though I think it'll have steep competition by Iron Hands next year), there is quite some variety in both pokemon choices and archetype, with both hard TR, semi TR and bulky offense showing up and a pretty healthy selection of support pokemon.
If you're curious, this was the day 2 usage for SV Worlds
and the top cut
More centralized than the year before, with Urshifu in all teams and Flutter Mane being "the mon to beat", most of them are BO though you do have a couple semi TR teams. Incidentally as I mentioned some posts ago, Hyperoffense is basically unplayable, you'd basically end up in "i either win at the lead or lose on the spot" in most matches due to not having switchins.
(It was pretty interesting how Lando-T went from basically unusable in reg D to being all over the place in reg E due to scarf tera flying being super strong into ogerbonk)
We're never ridding of lando-T, no matter how harsh the gen, he always finds its way back xD
I think there’s definitely ways to do ancient unova. There’s plenty of different biomes and landmarks, and they don’t really need to be in a neat circle like LA.
Assuming it’s split into separate areas like Hisui, could easily have a snowy area (Twist Mountain, Dragonspiral Tower), desert area (Relic Castle), and coastal area (undella bay, abyssal ruins). Then could go to the southeast for the basic starting area (with Pinwheel forest) or centre it around Lostlorn Forest or Abundant Shrine. The northeast would work as something similar to the highlands, with Opelucid and Village bridge conceivably existing.
Johto is the other go to for a legends game, but I think that would be way harder to make work as the geography across the region is fairly similar, and would be harder to divide up into interesting regions.
Assuming it’s split into separate areas like Hisui, could easily have a snowy area (Twist Mountain, Dragonspiral Tower), desert area (Relic Castle), and coastal area (undella bay, abyssal ruins). Then could go to the southeast for the basic starting area (with Pinwheel forest) or centre it around Lostlorn Forest or Abundant Shrine. The northeast would work as something similar to the highlands, with Opelucid and Village bridge conceivably existing.
Johto is the other go to for a legends game, but I think that would be way harder to make work as the geography across the region is fairly similar, and would be harder to divide up into interesting regions.