Worse than that, it’s a dog fighting sim where fictionally it goes “don’t worry, the dogs really like living in the ball, they like only emerging to fight, they like fighting, they understand human language, and they respect you more if you’re a better dog fighting guy!”
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Then years (years!) later they’re like, oh right, you can be a dog fighting girl too!
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Here’s the thing you haven’t considered though - Pokemon is actually cool
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I feel like we could do an entire thread of sentences like these
“Katamari Damacy is just a dung beetle sim”
“Persona 5 is just an incel sim”
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Wait til you hear what I’m gonna say Dear Esther simulates
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persona 5 implies that you have sex
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Because it’s too cowardly to go beyond implication. Though realistically speaking it’s probably because it would make the game illegal to distribute where the age of consent is high enough
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…because of the implication
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DO IT!
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Ain’t no one disagreeing with me.
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yes, i think the tediousness of all the conversations like this (not here on IC, of course) stem back to games not knowing what an ADV/NVL (“VN”) is.
keeping it on brand for the thread, though : this is probably somehow Philips/CDi’s or Trip Hawkins’/3DO’s fault
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Things about Pokémon that don’t suck:
- Jesse
- James (but mostly because of Jesse)
- Jesse and James’ Meowth from the anime
- That Meowth talks and has human level intelligence and none of the other insufferable beasts do (rest in power Maddie Blaustein)
- Jesse and James’ Wobbuffet
- The item duping glitch in Gen 1, even though that’s part of what makes Rare Candies suck so bad
- Mr. Mime becoming your stepdad
- Machamp, Incineroar, possibly any other Pokémon that get title belts outta nowhere (R.K.O. OUTTA NOWHERE) when they evolve
- Mimikyu
- Slowpoke
- Drampa
- Galarian Weezing
- That the Pokemon movies ever get so self-serious like when Ash fuckin’ died and Pikachu cried
- The kid in Gen 1 who runs up to you greets you and talks about how he likes shorts (they’re comfy and easy to wear) and then challenges you to a battle and he absolutely sucks
- Brock’s frying pan becoming a drying pan
With that in mind, here are some other things that still also sucks about Pokémon:
- Pretty much all of Jesse and James’ other Pokémon other than Meowth and Wobbuffet
- That there has to be Evil and Yucky and Mean Pokémon for the Team [Badguys] in every generation
- Every section of every page on Bulbapedia for a specific Pokémon where it describes a canonical example of that Pokémon from the anime
- Jinx and any other racist designs
- That Jinx is Ice type? What?
- Mr. Mime, in addition to British Mr. Mime
- Slowbro and Slowking
- The localization calling onigiri jelly doughnuts
- When the anime gave little kids seizures
- That the Pokemon movies ever get so self-serious like when Ash fuckin’ died and Pikachu cried
- That Ash’s Pikachu is never gonna become a Raichu even though that would give him better stat scaling even if he was at level cap
- That Pokémon in the anime can probably swap in and out a move loadout even if they are still limited to 4 moves in any particular battle
- Togepi and its whole evolutionary line
- Any other time the anime, which is already fundamentally a commercial for the game and its associated products, drilled down even further, and acted as an advertisement for features in the upcoming games (like how Togepi was an advertisement for Pokémon breeding basically)
- Any time the anime diegetically rationalizes a game mechanic for any reason
- Brock being a sex pest
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I remember having a long heated argument about this as a kid. My friend was adamant that Ash would only be able to carry six Pokémon because “that’s how it works in the game”. I kept telling him (with a child’s words) that this is an incredibly contrived and asinine way to adapt a video game and that there’s no way in hell they’d actually give a shit about following such an arbitrary rule. I got SO pissed when they then had an episode where Ash can’t have more than six Pokémon for whatever reason. Must’ve been the first time I had big OPINIONS about adaptation, haha.
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You were so real for that Kiki. And you were still right overall, you just underestimated how anal they’d be about it
There’s another thing that sucks, the dumb little belt thing in the anime that only has 6 spots.
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I’ll disagree. Especially in games where there is no driving except for one mission or set piece it’s always done in a really weird, friction-y way with controls that make zero sense and I love feeling what someone who has never touched a driving game thinks that should feel like.
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Is there a distinction to be made here between games where you drive a car (Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite, my summer car, hypothetically others), and games where you are a car (Outrun, Resident Evils 1, 2, 3, and 4, etc.)
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My declaration includes GTA, Ridge Racer, and Mario Kart.
Motorcycles are ok though. Hovercrafts are cool.
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This is the only time in my life you’ll catch me defending the Pokémon anime, but the answer to me has to do with the fact that Ash is specifically a Pokémon trainer, as in the type that battles others and challenges gyms and so on. It’s like a sport! And the sport rules are balanced around six Pokémon. If a rogue professional football player randomly decided to bring a second ball on the field nobody would let that fly – which is to say, I can’t imagine anyone in more casual/non-competitive applications to follow this, but it makes perfect sense for Ash to. Little kids playing football with however many balls and whatever other made up rules is of course perfectly fine. But for Ash, as a competitor, he’s using the standardized sports equipment of the six-slot belt because it’s in compliance with the rules.
Wobbuffet is cool :)
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