They have a team of math nerds at GameFreak that sat around during the creation of these games and decided to create a digital torture device instead of a fun game. The time they must have spent on these calculations they could have spent doing cool things like letting the player character smoke cigarettes, or including the full Pokedex, which was unavailable in Sword and Shield for the first time in a Pokemon game.1 One of the reasons the producer of the game gave for why they kept Pokemon out, was that it would have "much higher fidelity with higher quality animations," which is really funny because they didn't do that either! It looks like shit!
Okay, I am an upper-echelon hater, but the old school models have so much more charm and substance, and when they just kinda moved a tiny bit you didn't mind because the sprites were dope and the games were sick for their time. I love when I use "Scratch" with my Pokemon and they couldn't bother to do anything at all with it. It hops an inch off the ground and then a little scratch mark shows up. I wouldn't even be criticizing this if it wasn't their excuse. You can have more Pokemon with shitty graphics and animations, or less Pokemon with better ones, but you can't have less that look like trash and aren't animated. That's like...rule number 1.
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| Pictured: 2019 era battle animations |
Enough about all that wack shit. I'm pissed off at these stupid catch rules. I can sometimes throw a normal Pokeball on a Pokemon with full health and it will catch it, and sometimes I throw an Ultraball on a Pokemon with <5% health and they bust out immediately. Here's a gif if you don't believe me:
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| +25 level Ultraball back-to-back escapes BULLSHIT |
This one truly sent me over the edge and I had to go and look up the catch rates and I found this website: Catch Rate Calculator for Pokémon Sword and Shield (Gen 8) - RotomLabs. You have to enter the Pokemon, Pokeball, both your levels, their current HP, if they had a status effect, how many badges you had at the time, and how many unique species you have in your Pokedex.
When I plugged in the data for this fight I got this:
What the fuck is the point of all that bullshit if I'm 25 levels above this Pokemon and using an Ultraball and I still only have a 45% chance to catch it? That's what the numbers say, but I threw 7 straight balls at this thing. Thanks, Masuda. I bow down to your wisdom. I know games are hard to make, and some things have to be sacrificed for the greater good of the product. It makes total sense that a 6-tier mathematical catch rate system for each Pokemon needs to exist in a single player game. I'll gladly take a boring game that looks like shit if I also have to pull my hair out to do the thing the game is known for.
This is the catch rate formula for this game:
These nerd bastards are pissing me off. What is the point of this? Making Pokemon harder to catch makes no sense. For people who don't care about catching a lot and are just beating the game, you can beat it with any number of easily catchable ones. For people who care about catching all of them, they are already to committed to catching them, this just adds some extra time to their journey without any added challenge or value. So who is this for? Did they get an excessive amount of fanmail asking if they could throw 6-10 Pokeballs that the Pokemon break out of first? Even if they did, once you start listening to the fans, might as well go sit in the bleachers, you're out of the game.
Beyond that, there are no memorable towns or dungeons, it was easy as piss, the Wild Areas suck dog dick, and the Pokemon aren't sexy.
You used to go through haunted houses and on cruise ships, through dark caves and in an arcade with playable gambling games. You used to feel like you were exploring, the sections between towns were difficult, and it paid off with a cool town. One of the towns in Sword/Shield is Ballonlea, which has a Pokecenter, 2 houses, and the gym. It was so tacked on I can't believe they let it get into the game that way. The very first Pokemon game from 1996 had places like a Pokemon graveyard and the safari zone. You would get cool moves that were not only battle-ready but essential to progress, like cut and fly and surf. The story was you were just some little kid Pokemon trainer, but then you end up taking down an evil criminal organization. It was cool as hell, and memorable to this day. You don't have any of that joy or whimsy or fantastical elements in Sword and Shield. Oh, I guess it is really cool that they spent time adding in Dynamaxing, which does nothing and adds an hour to every battle you have to do it. Fly is replaced with an automatic flying taxi service. Snooze. You get the bike instantly and can use it all over the damn place. You had the damn cave at the end of Red with Mewtwo in it. Damn, Pokemon Red is fucking sick maybe I should go back and play that.
As with all modern shit games, they turned Pokemon into Skyrim. There's a little accessible something for everyone, making the depth so shallow you couldn't drown an ant in it, while simultaneously stretched so thin you can see an ant through it. Nobody is happy with a game like this except for people who have been lobotomized by watching Reality TV.
Some of the high-quality animations, like: Jump slightly, swing one arm, and twist a smidgen
I cannot stress this enough: put the fun back in games. You don't need a complex equation for catching Pokemon. We are gonna catch them all, Gamefreak, I fucking promise you. Just let us catch them. You could literally do a catch rate to the inverse of their max health. 100% HP = 0% catch rate, 50/50, you get it. Done. Now put a cutscene in where I have to go on a roller coaster shaped like a giant Onix but it gets stuck at the top because of a rogue squad of Fearow and I have to fight all of them to get the thing going again. Jesus christ this shit is so easy. Hire me, I'm the real Gamefreak.
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