Evan Ferrel

To start with, it’s too easy. I love Pokémon, have played since the red/blue days when I was unable to even read and wandered around the Viridian City forever because I couldn’t read the text bubble telling me to go back. It was hard, and not simply because of the fact that I was too young, but because I had to level up each Pokémon individually, select the correct Pokémon to train for each gym, and couldn’t switch out my box Pokémon whenever I wanted. This is now gone. You don’t even have to battle the wild Pokémon or trainers anymore if you don’t want to, you can literally traverse the entire map right from the start and just walk around the high leveled Pokémon. My favorite Pokémon games are crystal and emerald. Crystal because it was the perfect story and had all of the greatest parts of gold and silver. Emerald because it improved on the originals formulas and gave us another great story in another great area, plus a plethora of interesting side content. The thing that these games both had that violet and scarlet do not is secrets. Secret areas, secret quests, secret ways of catching secret Pokémon, and secret ways of continuing the story. I feel we have started to be treated like children with these new Pokémon games. The story is bland and childish, I get it, it’s a kids game. But the crowd that originally fell in love with Pokémon grew up, the games need to do a little growing up too. I miss the days of defeating team rocket from stealing Pokémon and Team Magma/Aqua from potentially destroying the world. Now I’m just playing bully against some mistreated school kids. Again, I get it, it’s a kids game. But kids are smart enough to understand more complex stories than this. And then games the graphics. They arn’t as bad as they are made out to be but wow they arn’t good. Breath Of The Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were able to manage some incredible environments with lots of moving parts, extreme draw distances and few slow downs. Not sure why Pokémon couldn’t do this, maybe because they focused too much on having large numbers of Pokémon all over the place??? Seriously guys, you coulda put down some grass for us to walk around in, like in the old days real easily and put most of the Pokémon in that, woulda fixed the slow downs. While I’m at it, what’s with the Pokémon count? Shouldn’t it be hard to find some of these guys? And the size… isn’t Gyrados supposed to be like 21’ long? That’s huge, like the size of a bus. You’re also supposed to be 16 or so, why do I look like I’m 10? Now I’m just ranting. Just sad this is where GameFreak decided to go with the franchise. Again, love Pokémon played most of the games, it’s just been getting more and more challenging to rationalize paying for a new one every few years. One more thing, because it bugs me, what’s with the hats and glitter??? Who thought that was a good idea??? The Mega Evolutions were sweet, why change it????