I miss the sense of adventure

XY might have had some interuptions by the retarded friends, but SM killed exploration for good.

Fuck SM.

Replaying the old games now being 21. I don't think there ever that level of adventure than when I played the games as kid

I'm curious what direction they'll be going in the next games. I suspect they'll unfortunately continue the way they've been going, if for no other reason than to show off what they've managed to do with the Switch's hardware. Lots of spectacle and cutscenes I'd imagine

>>33449902
I'm expecting more and more story heavy Pokemon games.

>>33450023
I think they have found a balance for the switch games

>>33449839
I just found that age coupled with the lack of interesting things to even look forward to has killed the sense of adventure. Hell, I even found a sense of adventure with Gen 5, the region that was basically a straight line, because at least going to the next town had something to see or at least served some purpose.

>>33449839
try some rom hacks OP

It's just our age, man. As a kid, we had such vast imaginations. Now, as the real world hits, we realize life isn't rainbows, and we retreat, and lose that spark in our eyes. It's sad, but the truth.

>>33450612
My first game was moon, I then went back and played yellow and crystal and am working on emerald now.

The old games are dramatically better, there's no question. The only thing moon has over this is online play

>>33450617
are you 12 by chance?

>>33450624
Just because he recently started Pokemon doesn't mean he's a child, that's batshit logic.

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I'll make a very open-style world pokemon-like game for you anon, I gotchu

>>33449839
Literally nostalgia. The old games seemed like an adventure because you were a retarded kid and didn't know anything about them. Maybe you should get the fuck off this board where you'll know everything about them 3 weeks before they're out.

>>33450617
You're making up a story to back up your own argument.
>As a Trump supporter...
>As a black man...
>As someone who started with Moon...

>>33449839
I found 3d, story, and more symphonic music ruined the games.
2d had it's charm, giving you only one angle of view avoids disorientation and makes maps iconic. Story should be sparse and meaningful (pokemon's stories are always baby bullshit). And symphonic music blends all the instruments together so you don't have any catchy melodies.

Haven't bothered with the games since XY for these reasons.

>>33451350
this

The only games I didn't feel had a sense of adventure was SM. And I'm sure I'll be saying something different when Gen 8 comes along.

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a few thoughts on this, possibly incoherent as i need sleep soon

- pokemon isn't new anymore, there are only so many variations of this same formula they can do, and since you know everything already there isn't much to discover. this doesn't excuse lazy level design but that is only part of the issue

- simpler graphics and the limitaions of the older systems leave more room for you to fill in the gaps with your imagination
it's easier to accept a handful of building and some random blocks to be a city with surrounded by trees. with 3d models these same locations now look sparse considering they're not filled with much more than they used to be, it just looks technically nicer

- you've probably spent hundreds of hours playing the games, the magic is gone, you're grown up now

that said, sm were sorely lacking as far as exploration goes, the games play more like your a tourist tagging along lillie's grand story than doing your own little adventure

The lack of that sense of adventure isn't due to the story, but due to the region itself. Alola is just shallow. Teleports, buses that'll drive you to your destination and a lack of branching paths combined with lackluster route design just sort of strangle that exploration itch. It's far too convenient. Which is strange considering it's region based on Hawai'i. Speaking honestly, you should be getting lost in mountains, forests and caves. It should feel really natural, but it doesn't.

>>33451550
> simpler graphics and the limitaions of the older systems leave more room for you to fill in the gaps with your imagination
it's easier to accept a handful of building and some random blocks to be a city with surrounded by trees. with 3d models these same locations now look sparse considering they're not filled with much more than they used to be, it just looks technically nicer

Huge contributor, right here.

I just did a Pokemon marathon and replayed Crystal, Emerald, Platinum and HGSS, moving on to BW1 soon, and I have to say the nostalgia/you were a kid arguments are absolutely laughable. It's clear as fucking day that the series went in the opposite direction of expanding its adventure elements sometimes after gen 4, definitely by the time Ohmori took over the shift was complete.

>>33451550
>>33451577

I hadn't thought of this before. My main issue lies with he game telling me where I'm meant to go all the time as of SM, as opposed to earlier games making me want to go places.

The story in SM being Lillie's is probably a major contributor to my disinterest in SM as well.

>>33451376
Nostalgiatard.

>>33451759
IMO, it's just more of the same. The games always shoo you off places, whether it's to a gym or to face off against that crime syndicate for that MacGuffin. It's just a lot more blatant in SM.

>>33451582
This. IMHO BW was the first step in the wrong direction but I'm sure thirsty N fangirls will try to prove me otherwise.

>>33451582
This. Holy shit. Faggots need to actually go back and play the older titles instead of spouting shit about nostalgia.

Hacked Gold and Emerald on my 3DS after beating Moon and boy did I miss when the games actually left you alone for a while to adventure and explore shit. Fuck Masuda and Ohmori for dumbing things down and forcing more story shit in Pokemon.

>>33449857
this, all i wanted to do was pick up from ORAS in training my mons, I had no joy in the main game.

SM was the most blatantly linear game in the entire series so it's not just nostalgia.

The "go through small section -> cutscene -> go through another small section -> cutscene" shit was fucking terrible

Say what you will about XY but at least the game left you alone for pretty good lengths of time.

>>33451376
>symphonic music blends all the instruments together so you don't have any catchy melodies.
wtf is going on in your brain man

>>33449839
The death of exploration and interruptions in the game ala the friends in XY started with BW. Unova was literally just a straight line in BW (BW2 alleviated this somewhat, but not really much).

BW was also the beginning of story > adventure, at least in DPP there was less railroading and much more vast routes/caves.

XY and SM are more about stories than actual battling and adventure, especially SM where even the routes have virtually nothing of value in them other than a straight line with some trainers on it.

>>33450617
>Started with moon

Lol fuck off fag

>>33449839
Story oriented pokémon is trash, BW had a great postgame because for the first time in the game you could just do your thing and explore the world without needing to worry about some NPC blocking your path with unskippable dialogue and ridiculously easy battles

BW had the retarded friends and a circular map

XY had the retarded friends and a slightly less circular map

SM had the retarded friends, a marker on the map telling you where to go, cutscenes every few seconds and 4 circular maps

we only go downhill from here

>>33449839
I don't disagree but gen 1 is a pretty bad example. Gen 2, 3 and 4 all had great exploration opportunities though.

>>33452705
4 is definitely the king, by some margin. But apparently kids in Japan complained about getting lost so they took that as another excuse to move towards circles of tubes.

>>33449839
Yet despite everything i bet you and every other "complainer" in this thread haven't explored areas like Kala'E Bay or Haina Desert until postgame.

>>33452711
Seriously? Jesus

>people keep saying it's because we've grown up or nostalgia
>having a blast playing through gen 4 right now a after skipping it as a child
Face it, new Pokemon is shit.

>>33450196
And what makes you say that like it's fact? Literally nothing is known about the games, absolutely ZERO is known.
Gamefreak are going story heavy and have been since Gen 5

>>33449839
the sense of adventure was at its peak during Gen 4 IMO

>>33452755
Gen 4 is new Pokémon and it's shit.

>>33453368
t. genwunner

>try to explore anywhere beyond the place you're supposed to go in s/m
>my stoutland is sniffing for buried treasure, guess you'll have to come back later, haha :^)
>you can't go into this route until after you've cleared the trial :^)
At least in the older games, there are many occasions where you can skip past a place to a new route or two, or three or even another town entirely and do stuff before taking care of business in the town you skipped.
There's so much railroading and so many roadblocks in S/M that even when the game decides to let you explore a tiny bit more than usual, hours worth of encountering said roadblocks in all of the previous areas conditions players to not explore anywhere other than where they're supposed to go

daily reminder if OR/AS had gone more along the exploration route + singleplayer battling instead of mulitplayer focused postgame they would've been the best games since gen IV

instead we got mediocre remakes of good games with basically no aspects of the best game in the series

all improvements in OR/AS just come naturally from previous games and their additions

>>33453319
AHAHAHAH fuck off sinnohfetus
I can't believe you are still trying to defend that pile of shit.
Gen 4 was the first one WITHOUT a sense of adventure.
Please fuck off from this board.

>>33453368
>A game from 11 years ago is "new"

>>33453523
>Gen 4 was the first one WITHOUT a sense of adventure.
That's a weird way to spell Gen 5

>>33453516
People seem to forget the R/S had 0 postgame, Emerald had the frontier but that's about it.
The generation that had the most postgame content is Gen 4, and 2 if you count an empty Kanto.

>>33453741
While they didn't really have anything that unlocks after beating the game there was a lot of optional content.

>>33453741
it also had the Battle Hill, some postgame battles (eg. gym leader rematches), the neat Kyogre/Groudon sidequest (which were a bit cooler than the random islands in OR/AS), the new safari zone and some other shit like the ditto tunnel

it's not a quantitive amount of content, but it's quality enough to make it worth it

not to mention a lot of stuff is extremely easy to miss if you go straight from Sootopolis to the E4

>>33453446
Playing through Sun trying to use cool mons I didn't get to use the first time, and Akala Island is pissing me off so bad. I REALLY wanted a Tirtouga for this run, right? Well first I get hit with
>sorry lol my stoutland is stubborn ;)))
Fine, whatever I'll beat Lana and come back
>oops, the Diglett are to strong for mediocre trainers ;;)))
Alright then, I go beat Kiawe and Mallow
>lemme check how many Z-Crystals you have... nah, got to the Dimensional Lab
That last one was really infuriating because Olivia doesn't even finish her first thought, the game just yells at you for skipping the Lab. Then when I finally get the fossil, it's level 15 while my team is close to 30. Fuck this game

I have never cared about the "sense of adventure" in any Pokemon game.

>>33452806
They said that they heard alot of complaints and Praises from it. Meaning they probably found a balence

I think since Gen3 we've gotten a lot more story as the games went on, and I'll admit that was a good balance of story and exploration.

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>>33449839
>just finished exploring and discovery every inch of BotW world, having a blast along the way
>come back to Pokemon
>everything feels like a straight line

It pretty jarring actually. If any misses exploration take a break from Pokemon and play a good open world game of your choice,

>>33452716
Wrong.

>>33451376
>pokemon's stories are always baby bullshit
He says as SM's plot involves somebody disowning her children and fusing with a Pokemon to make an abomination

>>33451333
Yeah, I mean, my first Pokemon game was Crystal which I believed I started playing in 2002 and I wouldn't know about Ruby and Sapphire until a year later when Nintendo started advertising it in America, but I'd imagine even when I started Crystal Nintendo was probably going all out on the RS advertising in Japan.

I first went on Serebii in 2004 and I immediately found out about the DS games Diamond and Pearl which have Snorlax's pre-evo, Gonbe, in it. Honestly, becausr I was so little, it felt like an eternity just waiting for screenshots of those games.

>>33452716
And they're dreadfully boring.

>>33455771
the thing is its fucking pokemon, nobody fucking wants or cares about some half assed edgy story. If i wanted to play an rpg for story i wouldnt play fucking pokemon

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>>33453427
gen 1 was objectively the best

>>33458595
The first three gens were top-tier.

>>33451582
>>33453446
These.

Sense of exploration comes from not knowing ahead of time what you /can/ do. Game Freak has left this design philosophy, consciously or not, in favor of not knowing what you /will/ do.

The further back you go from Sun and Moon, you will find that there are things you are unsure of in terms of the world and the things you can do with your Pokemon. The further forward you go, it becomes more about not knowing what will happen.

Since these are games and not books/film, focusing on the latter will cause the games to feel empty and ultimately uninteresting. There is a time and place for games to tell stories, but railroading a player into decisions they do not genuinely make will never be as satisfying an experience they create on their own.
Even games devoid of actual designed story can have their gameplay be the conduit for a narrative.

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>>33458595
kek

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hi anons! how do i teach transform to a smargle?
i tried to sketch the move many times but it says it fails
is the emerald version
please help me

>>33459055
Double battle. Your partner uses transform then use sketch on your transformed partner

>>33459166
it failed

>>33451550
>the games play more like your a tourist
That's really what it comes down to. Alola is a tourist trap region.

>>33452722
The worst part is that it's actually bad for the kids.
Map markers cause your spatial reasoning skills to be stunted.
When companies like Gamefreak give in to such complaints, they're effectively sabotaging education.

>>33459055
Have Smeargle use Substitute against any wild Ditto. This makes Ditto's Transform fail, and you can Sketch Transform directly.

>>33452755
gen 4 is where the issues happend in terms of adventure. i never understand why people lump diamond and pearl with g/s and r/b. d/p had alot of issues that sun and moon and x and y had. it got fixed with platinum

>>33451333
>because you were a retarded kid and didn't know anything about them.
Or perhaps you're a retarded adult who doesn't realize the old games now don't feel like an adventure because you've played them before and know where to go without question.

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I would really like to have a more nonlinear, open-world style for the main games again

Maybe GF will be influenced by BOTW's success on the Switch

I don't care for cinematic narratives, I really like the PSO/Dark Souls style of storytelling through clues in the world rather than cutscenes. I guess that makes me a lorefag, but one of my favorite parts of R/B was finding the research notes on Cinnabar Island and reading the dex entries to learn more about the world. It always disappointed me when older Pokemon just got their dex entries pasted into the new games instead of adding new information and expanding the world

>>33461402
>I guess that makes me a lorefag
It just makes you a person who understands that video games are an interactive medium and therefore lend themselves to different storytelling techniques.
Cutscenes are a failure of the game designer.

I don't think it's age or nostalgia related. I grew up with G/S and I never really found a sense of 'adventure' with Johto. I loved the game and still do in a very nostalgia-ish way, but Johto actually felt very comfy and local to me and still does.

Much later when D/P came out, that's when I really got the sense of adventure. Most Pokemon games from Gen 1-6 have had the sense of adventure, but I became aware of it at age 16 when I was nearly 10 years into my obsession with Pokemon.

It's definitely been lost since though. B/W was the first time the game felt truly rail-roady, but the whole game had a far deeper story and more fleshed-out characters so people kind of ignored it for the most part, especially since B/W2 brought things back to basics and made the region a lot more open.

X/Y was actually pretty good for the sense of adventure, I'd say the only thing that ruined it was the rushed feeling past Coastal Kalos and the fact that you were never too far from Lumiose city so there wasn't much of a sensation of distance.

OR/AS really messed things up though. I was never a big fan of Hoenn but they made it feel so much smaller with all the interactions and free gifts and mini-cutscenes, there was no sense of being stranded like there was in R/S.

And yeah, S/M have killed it so far. Maybe they understood that with a smaller region, the only way to not make it feel like a game half the size of X/Y is to railroad the player and put lots of emphasis on cutscenes and story but it still doesn't satisfy, especially when you consider that Alola is presented as being this deep region which looks small on the outside but has amazing caves, volcanoes and interesting areas to explore and yet the actual map is tiny and areas that are plainly visible are completely inaccessible.

My hope here lies in US/UM giving S/M the BW2 treatment and opening up the region and taking away the focus on story so it feels more like a Pokemon game again.

I don't think I will ever have the same feeling while playing Pokemon as I did with Gens 1-2 as a kid. I think too much of it is tied to me being a child, knowing a bunch of other kids playing it at the same time too, not having internet access to spoil the game, etc

With that said, I've been able enjoy/get through the first iteration of every generation except S/M. I really think that S/M is just a little too linear for reasons everyone else has already stated.

I've gotten older for sure and if a Pokemon game in the same style/level of complexity/etc as the first few generations came out today, I would likely not enjoy it as much as I did when I was a kid but I still think S/M is just not as good as it's predecessors.

tldr: I think nostalgia plays a part but 'S/M is just not as good' plays a part in it too

>>33452417
I kind of agree. The old games had very limited technology, so there was definitely effort put in to create distinct melodies to compensate for that.

However, that's not to say that later games have poor melodies (many are great), but the old school ones are all the more impressive given that they can evoke emotion despite being 16 bit.

>>33449839
I've been playing green and really paying attention to understand what made Pokémon good in the first place (besides being 13 when I first played).

The story is shallow and the battles are simplistic. The only real strength gen 1 had is that sense of being lost and alone in an unknown world. You feel compelled to explore and you don't really care for any NPC besides your rival. It's your journey, it's simple and fun.

Story received some attention and the battles were just polished since then. It's understandable that some people will think there is no reason to believe gen 1 is better than any other.

But improving story has its drawbacks. Now you get interrupted by annoying cutscenes and a lot of focus on other character's issues. The regions got more style and detail, but the navigation is obvious and feels more like a task than exploration.

The games got better in every aspect except the one which most mattered in the first one. So, objectively, we can't say the games got worse, they just got different. That's why the fanbase is so divided.

Now, on a personal level: Nostalgia may play a role in finding gen 1 good, but that's not what makes anyone consider newer games bad. They killed the exploration factor. That and the hand holding makes gen 6 and 7 unbearable.

>>33465805
>So, objectively, we can't say the games got worse, they just got different.
Arguably, we can say that the games have gotten worse. Mechanically and technologically they have gotten better, but in regards to the main game the quality has dropped massively.

While story is not inherently bad in a game, and there are certainly other RPGs that handle it well, it has done nothing but take the player out of the gameplay to a near constant rate in the recent Pokemon games, especially in SM. When you're being stopped by NPCs and facing route blocks pretty much every town and route then there's a problem. It lowers the enjoyment for those who want to explore and focus on the adventure, in other words people who want actual gameplay. On the other hand people who enjoy story, ie something that is blatantly not gameplay, would enjoy it more.

GF focusing more on story has done more to hurt the games more than help it. Take a look at the regions of the earlier gens and compare them to the recent ones. The regions now are so obviously designed to be catered to story, which again is not gameplay, while the earlier regions were designed to influence players to play more as they often had optional areas, different paths you could take, and secrets you could find. So yeah, the games look prettier, sound nicer and have better mechanics, but the meat of the main game is lacking heavily due to everything in it being catered more towards story now.

>>33465952
Well, when I said the games just got different I didn't take into account story shouldn't compensate any flaws since it's not related to gameplay, as you said. That makes me agree there is not much in newer games to make up for their poor design.

We have to think what GF is trying to achieve here. They want to appeal to kids, making the games linear and "watchable" may seem like a good idea in that sense. And alienating the older fan base is not something they'd care about.

I know I'm going quite off topic, but what we need is a Pokémon spin off for older players. The sad truth is that we are seeking for an experience which Pokémon games have potential for, but will never pull off.

>>33463214
>there was no sense of being stranded
That's an interesting thing to say, but I think I know what you mean. I'm playing Emerald right now and just reached Pacifidlog town while training for the Mossdeep Gym, and it definitely felt like quite a distance. I turned on my copy of alpha sapphire out of curiosity and explored through route 119 and the ocean, and the scaling was definitely smaller. This made the game feel very "safe", for a lack of a better word. Like you are only out for a small stroll instead of trespassing into the wilderness. Funnily enough though, this small scale world map works better with Kalos. I think it's because the region itself is so modern and connected, much like irl France, and gives off that touristy vibe which lots of people liked. But I don't know what to make of that. Maybe the engine or whatever of each generation is more important to how the games come out? That would explain why gen 6 Hoenn is so much worse than the original, and perhaps why gen 4 Johto didn't suffer in the way Hoenn did?

>>33449839
This is a poor argument. Pokemon has always had a main story. If you don't follow the story you can't complete the game. With technology developers have been able to tell a story better than they could before.

All the "adventure and discovery" is just the player learning to play the game because technology limited how the player is educated about the game. You can play modern pokemon games the exact same way you play old ones. An NPC or barrier preventing progress is technically no different than a bush or rock you need to learn how to break.

You can try to ignore the story and go exploring in modern games just like old games. You eventually have to get back to the story to progress regardless of game.

It has nothing to do with nostalgia. The new games just add a bunch of optional stuff you can do on top of the old stuff. You just fail to comprehend that you have changed and not the games. You are the problem, not the game.

It's like getting fat and looking at a mirror and saying the mirror is uglier without noticing how you have changed.

>>33467039
This is a poor argument.

>>33449872
You didnt have a set goal as a child. Now n days most fags want the best mons for endgame and feel let down when they don't get them 1 minute into the intro

>>33466885
Maybe it has to do with sprites and how things feel more zoomed out. To start with you seem much smaller as a sprite. Everything has less detail and therefore gives the illusion of being farther away and unable to see details. 3D modeling is not only more intensive, meaning smaller looking screens, but it's also more detailed.

>>33452716
>desert is arbitrarily walled off until a point
>it sucks like every other area in the game

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>>33453446
>There's so much railroading and so many roadblocks in S/M that even when the game decides to let you explore a tiny bit more than usual, hours worth of encountering said roadblocks in all of the previous areas conditions players to not explore anywhere other than where they're supposed to go


Fucking THIS. Why would I try to explore when the past 10 hours of the game have given me a black screen, fade to some guy saying "Woah Tauros is running wild in the 5th location in the game in a row!/Stoutland is searching for treasure/the trial gate is here fuck you/you haven't used the pokefinder/shopping mall is closed/you cant go to route 1 from route 3 go around the island/a hummingbird flapped its wings in kanto causing a blackout and making me thirsty"

There's a fucking map marker on the bottom screen, there is no need for this fucking railroading to exist. Add to the fact you use PokeUber and take boats around and you're just some idiot from kanto on vacation.

>>33449839
The problem is more linear, guided stories get higher reviews by normie reviewers. from least to most adventurous(no remakes)
1. RSE
2. DPP
3. GSC
4. RBY(adventurous but dull map)
5.XY(adventurous but too friendly)
7.SM(impossible to fail, just following NPCs around)

>>33468362
>DPP
>2nd place
AHAHAHAAH you wish you fucking sinnohfetus!
DPP are the ones that started guiding the player.
And SM feels more adventurous than fucking sinnoh, a region that is cut in two by a fucking mountain.

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R E M E M B E R

>>33468483
I have zero expectations for the game desu. GF are hacks. They should just let Nintendo make the games themselves.

>>33467039
Not really true. While you obviously have to eventually get back on the path the game intends you to follow, the old games, especially Gen 1 allowed you a lot more freedom to explore, at least at certain points. Even with obstacles blocking your way, you can still adventure around, realise you're stuck due to a fat Pokemon on the road and have to turn around and look for another option. You could even tackle certain gym leaders in any order.

The newer games completely funnel you in one direction, you can't leave a town and look for the way to a next one, because you'll immediately be stopped by a barrier, and that's assuming it hasnt sucked you into a cutscene that takes you to the next area with no input from the player at all.

Nostalgia may play a part, playing those games when they first came out and not immediately knowing everything because of leaks and walkthroughs definitely helped, but the way they make the games has also taken a different direction.

Which is why I'll continue to be confused by people who hate the hand holding and linearity but are against the Switch game being open world.

>>33468362
Hoenn baby alert.

>>33450617
> started with moon

Nice. 8-year-old spotted.

>>33468680
>implying the whole area around Fortree isn't the most adventurous shit we've ever gotten

>>33450627
Kill yourself nigger

>>33453523
You are fucking retarded

>>33465952
You have to remember that GF is horrifically lazy. A linear handhold-y game is much easier to make because they don't have to make extra explorable areas.

>>33454850
A Pokemon game where you could just run up to the Elite Four whenever you felt you were ready would be an interesting change of pace.

>>33449839
Pokémon used to be treated as wild mysterious creatures.
Nowadays they are spoken of as cute friends who always lived with humans helping them.
You'll never read shit like "Be wary of Weedle's Poison Sting, use Antidotes to heal" or "I'll fight you with the aquatic Pokémon I just caught!" ever again.

>>33468879
I can't imagine all the extra event programming necessary for handholding being easier to do than drawing a bunch of extra map squares.

>>33451333
Wrong. It seemed like an adventure because you weren't told where to go and what to do all the time, there was no handholding or long gay cutscenes, your rivals were competitive instead of le power of friendship shallow fags, and, for the weaker willed, there was no temptation to wonder trade a pidgey before the first gym, getting a 6IV Gible with dragon rage that OHKO's everything.

>get surf in gen 4 and below
>can now backtrack and find optional water routes to explore, go through more caves, etc.
>get lapras in s/m
>dude now you can explore this bay for like tentacool or something lol

>>33471707
>get surf in sm
>have access to one of the 30 locations in the game with wingull

>>33471463
The hand holding just uses code that's already necessary for every cutscene in the game. New areas need to be planned, built and testef. You also have to take into account the possibility of sequecy breaking and make sure the player won t find a new Pokémon there that screws up the difficulty or level scaling of the rest of the game.

That's way harder than just inflating playing time with a silly dialog. And, since it's an activity that has no impact on gameplay, it can be done independently, which makes designing the game easier.

tl;dr: Stop being an apologist, they are lazy.

>>33471463
Well take Hoenn for example. Once you got Surf, and the Wailmers were cleared from Lilycove, you had an abundance of exploration. You could:

>access the secret area north of Rustboro
>access the abandoned ship
>access Pacifidlog Town and the strong current route
>access Mossdeep and Shoal Cave
>fight loads of trainers hidden on Mr.Briney's water routes

You had huge choice. And that sort of thing also happened with the Acro/Mach Bike - you had loads of little areas to discover depending on which bike you had with you at the time.

Contrast that with SM, where your chances for exploration are very low. You follow a set route around each island without much chance to veer off and explore a random side area. Herded from one place to the next.

>>33449839
This is just one of the reasons why Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 1-3 are vastly superior to anything that gamefreak can shit out.

>anarcho-primitivist Pokemon with strong survival simulator elements
>no towns or handholdy NPCs, just trackless miles of long grass, forests, caves, and the sea
>all pokeballs, potions, etc. have to be refined from natural materials like apricorns and shit

>>33449857
the only reason I play SM is for the furbait

>>33458595
that charizard is cute!

>>33460425
>d/p had alot of issues that sun and moon and x and y had
I don't remember Diamond not having a proper NatDex, Hall of Fame or enjoyable post-game.

People keep blaming the story as SM's downfall, but that's not the case. It's the map. GF could've fit more into Alola; they could've fit more in between the cutscenes. But they didn't. The story feels so intrusive because of how little there is to actually see and do in Alola. Practically no dungeons, worse route design than Kanto, if you can believe it, and a serious lack of Pokemon variety. If GF had given us some Fuego Ironworks or an Abandoned Ship or some Ruins of Alph then it would've felt like we touched base with Lillie and Co. every once in a while because of how much there was to explore. But there was practically nothing to explore, so Lillie and the story felt much more shoved in our faces.

>>33477329
This. Story isn't bad by itself (although personally I'd prefer a little less and I'd rather keep the syrupy sweetness of the modern anime out of the games). I can deal with story either way

But it's really annoying when it's "you can either go to the next marker or fuck I guess you can run in circles if you really want to". I want options damnit! Or at least more time/content between cutscenes

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>>33475670

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>>33479722
Roads are pretty shit, frankly.
The ancaps aren't right very often, but they hit it out of the park on the roads thing.

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>a Pokemon game set in a heavily industrialized area where there's no long grass, you have to take a bus to get from one area to another, and the only way to get new pokemons is to grind for money in No More Heroes-style minigames and buy^H^H^Hadopt them at the pokemon store

>>33472954
That makes sense.
I never claimed to be a programmer.

>>33451333

>Be me
>1999
>Playing Yellow
>It seemed like an adventure, I though game would be exactly as animu
>Fucking awsome game
>Pretty similar in next gens

>Gen 5 and 6
>Games become an apology to faggotness
>Linear as fuck regions

>Gen 7
>Didn't play SM
>Don't know nothing about SM
>Not interested
>Just read bad comments about SM

>>33481953
So, you only play the ingame

>>33482126
>playing the outgame

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>>33482126

Played, and no, if we talk about battles/post game it becomes worse

>>33465952
>when you're being stopped by NPCs and facing route blocks pretty much every town and route then there's a problem
Old man blocking your path so you have to go back and get the Pokedex.
NPC blocking you from going forward until you beat Brock.
Obligatory sidequest to help Bill. Have to battle almost all the trainers until you get to his house.
Route blocked by a tree because you need Cut.
Route connecting Cerulean with Saffron blocked.
Vermilion Gym blocked by a tree because you need Cut.
Route connecting Vermilion with Saffron blocked.
The only way to go to Celadon is going back to Cerulean, go through Route 9, the Rock Tunnel (in which you can't see shit if you don't have Flash) Lavender Town, Route 7 and Route 8.
Route 16 blocked by a Snorlax.
Connection between Route 11, 12 and 13 blocked by a Snorlax.
You need to do an obligatory sidequest to get the Pokeflute. To get the Pokeflute you need to Sliph Scope, which you can get in the hideout of the evil team.
The list goes on and on, with Surf being the worst offender, since you can't finish the game without it.
It's exactly the same.

>>33482395
>progress being blocked by arbitrary story flags is exactly the same as progress being blocked by gameplay

>>33482424
>when you're being stopped by NPC's and facing route blocks pretty much every town and route then there's a problem
That was the only thing being brought into question. I provided those examples, which happened in the very first games. They being arbitrary story flags or gameplay doesn't change the fact that you were being stopped, even if ones are more excusable than the others.

>>33481953
The linearity and easiness in Gen V is disgusting, and I hate how the later Gens decided to use it as a new standard. Everything in BW was railroaded, just battle Cheren/Bianca/N, get to the next gym town (all normal towns are postgame-exclusive outside of the Pokecenter tutorial location), maybe fight Team Plasma and get plot and repeat. BW2 sucks less in some aspects but it's still bad. Of course, people will excuse all of this because "muh postgame", as if Platinum/HGSS didn't have better.

>>33482487
>linearity
I can see that, since you pretty much don't need to return at all to any of the previous locations.
>formula
Also agreed.
>easiness
Care to expand a little on this?
>inb4 because muh SE in near routes
That has been happening since the first games.

>>33468677
The old games have more of the map to explore but the new games have more features and attractions outside of the main game. Ask /vp/ and they probably love online battles, pokemon amie, megas, etc. Those things use up resources so you can't have all those features and a feature-rich map.

I don't use any of the new features personally but the reception has been overwhelmingly positive to those features. All I need is pokemon to catch and I'm happy. The only features I need are features that enrich the core experience, not add something tangentially.

>>33482623
feature creep is a punishment from God for programmers' hubris

>>33468404
I hate Sinnoh but I though it was pretty similar to Gen 3. One of the few things it got right in my opinion was the overworld. How was it guiding the player?

>>33482552
Opponents have shit-tier teams this time around. Hope you like Marlon's 3 mon team.
>inb4 "just use challenge mode"
The Key System was the worst implementation of a potentially decent idea.

I kinda miss the sprite/4-directional gameplay.

One of the things I love about Hoenn is the exploration. There's so much shit to do and see, and it actually feels like a "journey" to get to them (Long ass routes, tons of water, caves, towers, riddles, mechanic puzzles, no random "My pokemon is looking for something here" roadblocks for 99% of the game). Sinnoh is great too, yeah it started the handholding but the region was still incredibly packed and full of places to explore.

Sun and Moon would have been so much better if we were a tourist from another region or something and they just dropped us on the islands somewhere to go through the trials ourselves while exploring.

>>33482465
Anon, after Vermilion (which is just the 3rd gym) you can go to Lavender or even Saffron before beating Erika. The game slowly removes its roadblocks, it doesn't just block the next path each time you reach a new location.

>>33486978
You can also completely skip the third badge since it only gives you access to fly and you could go all the way to Fuchsia with only two badges.