Nuzlockes weren't cool because of the _difficulty,_ it was cool because it felt like Pokemon... You catch the Pokemon you happen to run into, you name them, and train them up to beat the Elite 4 and become champion. If they die, its like losing a dear friend... It leads to people being able to tell amazing stories with the Pokemon they adventured with. But now... Pokemon Nuzlockes kinda forgot the whole appeal of the challenge. :/
Agreed, I actually made a video about that a long time ago. I think nuzlockes definitely still have a place and can be interesting to new players or players who haven't learned enough game knowledge to trivialize the game. The story aspect was what made nuzlockes fun and interesting. Using the nuzlocke rules strictly as a challenge run removes that personal aspect, and exposes nuzlockes as kind of a nothing-burger of a challenge, since Pokemon's campaigns just aren't complex enough for them to be meaningfully challenging.
People who like nuzlockes for difficulty and people who like nuzlockes for story/content can co-exist You can have both People can like the same thing for different reasons
It just takes imagination. I did a complete playthrough of Violet regular and Scarlet half-nuzlocke (no permadeath). Scarlet half-nuzlocke was more fun cause I added story to them. The adorable, clumsy "starter" shiny Shinx evolving to brave leader Luxray. The Pawniard who developed from a bratty, bougie, stuck up child making fun of the Meditite I caught to a brave, hard to tell their emotion Kingambit. Meditite grew from a timid, eccentric, bullied kid to the meditative, powerful Medicham who Pawniard wants to become a Kingambit to impress since they fell in love with each other. Imagination is key
Both are valid. Personally I prefer difficulty hacks as they test my skills and make me prep and plan fights. It's like a puzzle. Demeaning people who see nuzlockes differently is both ridiculous and divisive. You can like one while respecting the other. Both have followings.
It was happening for a very long time, it just that prior to the nuzlocking scene being cleansed by hardcore nuzlocke being introduced it was instead "super extreme randomizer nuzlocke of pokemon sun episdoe 1" Where they then cheat to get some crazy encounter at the start of the run so people will watch it. Vanilla nuzelocke were pretty much dead as a concept for at least 15 years.
Not as damning as you think. Mario (including Wonder and Odyssey), Kirby (despite the bonus modes which are fairly difficult), Fire Emblem, Sonic (largely to fix games but also add challenge), Zelda (ranges from multiplayer to randomisers), Resident Evil (randomisers), Smash (too many for me to name) and Devil May Cry (mainly for 2, 3, DmC and 5) all have an abundance of modded content that I've seen featured by challenge runners, skill players or speedrunners. Pokemon depends on it more to cross the finish line of making an interesting playthrough, but this is the modern YT climate to a degree even with games which are console locked. Not all roads will lead to Kaizo, but it is common for primarily single player games to look for more spice.
Personally find that all a Poketuber needs is to make a wacky character to roleplay as on their pokemon journey. It’s pretty funny. My personal favourites are Team Sky and Keegan J
It's trully hilarious (for me) that the reasons why crab doesn't like nuzlockes and nuzlocke vídeos are exactly why i like them so much. And i can't even say he is Wrong for seeing those things as problems
i think the main problem of pokemon rom hacks is that they do not meddle with the AI. Despite the first 3 gens being completely open source (with gen 4 and BDSP on the way), the games still use the original ai, and at most up the diffuclty to use the champion AI for every battle, but they never go past that, so the game never makes use of SWITCHING, arguably one of the most important mehcanics in the game (shadow tag is banned in comp for this reason), and a lot of challenge runs go down to how much you can cheese the AI with the shit you caught and hope rng doesn't screw you over
@@to-ma-to4370 simply incorrect a random ai is unpredictable but that doesn't make it hard as it will often misplay in situations where it could easily win
Multiple difficulty hacks do use updated AI, it's just that it's often used in accordance with basically cheats that allow the AI to sometimes see what you are doing before settling on a move. Without it, the AI can only be improved so much.
Recently someone made a video of beating every seed of pokemon platinum. They simulated a billion seeds and created a set of inputs that would beat the game under any circumstances. Yes, we, as a species, beat Pokemon Platinum in its entirety.
I think you make a good point - Pokémon really isn't designed around challenge, so trying to stretch it to make challenge runs is not going to be easy. However, I imagine that part of the problem with the UA-cam scene is oversaturation and lack of imagination. Looking to Fire Emblem as an example, I kinda think something like a draft race could work - get together a group of Pokétubers with system knowledge, and have them pick a team of things that only they can use, then speedrun. But everyone's so focused on a narrow range of existing challenge runs that it's just getting stale. On another note, I don't think I agree with that guy you quote, because for me, the optimisation is the fun part. I think there's a parallel with Fire Emblem there, too: LTC is something that fascinates me, and the core of LTC is planning, not execution. Like with the Pokémon runs you mentioned, every move has already been planned out ahead of time, and to me that doesn't take away from the breadth of choices that needed to be selected from in either case. Yes, Pokémon has fewer, but reducing it down to "there are no choices" just because the chosen option comes from pre-analysis and system knowledge is, imo, wrong. For what it's worth, I think the equivalent of the Kaizo Emerald run is probably New Mystery Lunatic+ 0% growths, which has now been done. I doubt anything is ever going to top that in terms of challenge in Fire Emblem. You're probably right that it doesn't solve all Fire Emblem in quite the same way, but it's still something that, imo, makes all other challenge runs pale in comparison.
Coming from Pokémon, I LOVE the fact that each Fire Emblem game is unique, even when I DON'T LIKE the way a title handle certain mechanics I know there's a DOZEN other entries more in line for what I like or, hell, even just a dozen ways to enjoy the games I actually like, it's so refreshing moving to the GBA games to Echoes, to Path of Radiance, to Awakening and loving and hating each game for it's own merits, not just a diferent flavour of the same fucking game
How can you watch a 6 hour Ironman "highlight" where no one even dies?! Especially not Lilina... Great video, but you'll be hearing from my Nintendo Ninja team for PLAGIAZRING my original sentence about going from your mom's house to the hall of fame.
modern nuzlockes make me sad. they all feel so inorganic. the point of nuzlockes was to use pokemon you wouldn’t normally use and have things be unpredictable. now I see shit like calcs and repel manips, and it’s like they robbed any sort of authentic experience out of it. I think moving away from the comics people made to cramming an entire nuzlocke into one video was a mistake
I gotta mostly disagree, but I respect your opinion and understand it, I think the use of calcs and repel manipulation is part of the fun in nuzlockes, but not using them is also totally fine, calcs is just preparing and planning out the fights to come but it’s a bit overkill in a vanilla game, and repel abusing is just preparing an encounter, just like someone would for example skip a route to get a future encounter to guarantee a certain Pokémon in the route skipped, is just planning out and using the tools that the game gives you, and if someone doesn’t wanna do that it’s totally fine. The point of nuzlockes being in a single video is just that the people who make them started learning how to play the game better, not lose Pokémon in non important fights, and because of that just not have as much to say like in the past, like if someone did a nuzlocke series spanning on multiple videos where all they said was “I beat random trainer 1, I beat random trainer 2, I beat random trainer 3… all without losing a single Pokémon and barely getting damaged thanks for watching” isn’t fun, people are just getting to the point of the nuzlockes, important fights and when something happens in those random battles like a loss of a Pokémon or a close moment they normally mention it. And for your final point the loss of the comics, that is actually something I agree with, they were charming and creative but redundant today when you can just show the run in a video. (Sorry if it’s hard to read in some parts, my English isn’t the best)
One of the big reasons i don't like watching pchal is that i felt like it missed one of the big points: the reason naming Pokemon is a rule was to make an emotional attachment. It was to make you fall in love with scovillain because your starter died right before the water gym and thank arceus Pepper didn't low roll those bullet seeds because if she did this run was over. Then he told everyone and their mother to take the rare candy pill and there's just- no connection to the Pokemon anymore. I fell in love with nuzlockes because a UA-camr had an entire 40 episode series about his run and between every episode and after every grinding session he was telling stories about what his Pokemon were doing between episodes. When his starter got hit with an ohko move right before victory road we FELT it. That just isn't there anymore.
I'll have to disagree with you on this one. The way I see it, calcs and repel manips are just extra assurance to make sure, similar to looking up reinforcements and enemy stats beforehand. I do understand why you nay not like calcs, but competitive players and nuzlockers alike use them all the time, and use of them is often encouraged.
Yeah I agree. I don't like that a lot of them are 'i will get after 2 min 38 seconds and 16 frames for 6 perfect IV mudkip!' especially when it's on the vanilla games. I was enjoying chaotic meatballs shiny lock and even watching his streams until he started using a computer to hunt for him or manipulations. I get it but I'd rather watch a person hunt on 8 screens then watch them play Yu-Gi-Oh while a computer hunts.
It's pretty weird how in my mind, Kirby feels like a series of games more enjoyable to a wider age group than Pokemon, which just feels like baby's first RPG.
Even some really minor changes can shake things up. I'm playing Shadow Dragon but I gave bows 2-3 range (and added a couple 1-2 range "daggers" for sword=locked units) and that single change buffs archers, nerfs jav/handaxe spam and nerfs fliers.
I love Pokémon and play it all the time! Coincidentally, I generally like easy and simple games without much intensity. I prefer the aspect of using my imagination as I play to make it feel like an exciting adventure.
while i do think pokemon would be better trying to capture the feel of adventure rather than pure difficulty, they dont really do that either? there is no side activities anymore, the locales are tiny, and the world is poorly designed.
@@comyuse9103 well they dont need to be large. At least in the older games. You can make a whole bunch of space, but what on earth could you put in it that isnt already there?
@@josephbulkin9222 Additional tasks, stories, characters, easter eggs, powerups? People constantly describe loving games because there is something to do around every corner. Metroidvania's thrive on this with powerups. RPG's do this with quests. Life/farming sims just pack things with alternative game loops (mining, fishing, cooking, festival minigames, dating, haggling, etc).
I think whats funnier about pokémon too is when it does introduce hard challenges (e.g battle frontier), players have been so spoonfed the entire game and things like EVs, IVs, natures, eggmoves have never been properly communicated to the player that most players won't touch those harder postgame facilities because they get their side wheels removed and get wiped without any feedback of what they did wrong.
Is it a coincidence that the best nuzlocke videos are from players who aren't poketubers and are playing essentially blind. Chaos makes for good content.
Side note that's why I don't look up anything when I'm doing a Nuzlocke except for level caps every freaking battle takes the challenge and fun out of it
I feel that this is one of the things most people already knew but didn't want to talk about because they didn't want to be a party pooper or they're coping about it, so it's good to hear somebody finally talk about it.
I’m glad you mentioned fates when talking about mechanical differences in fire emblem games. I finished my first birthright run and then went to play conquest for the first time. I was not expecting such a different experience. It’s really interesting
Both Pokemon and Fire Emblem suffer from the same issue of "optimizing the fun out of the challenge" in challenge run contexts. Much like how you can solve a lot of Pokemon Nuzlockes with a calculator, you can solve Fire Emblem Ironmans with a calculator and a map with AI behaviors documented.
"Dude, just Chrobin solo Awakening. Only use E-rank weapons on Conquest. Just spam Wyvern Lords in 3H. Stats and skills only matter on 0% growths." I'm sick of it all.
Thank you for pointing out that nuzelockes are anti-thetical to the core identity and themes of pokemon lol. That is honestly why I never bothered to do nuzelockes myself.
I like some of the points you made in this video, but I think the anti-calc stance is a bit... weird? I don't see running the calcs as being any different from reading the damage forecast (or counting up how much damage you expect to take over enemy phase before committing your move) in a Fire Emblem game. The difference is largely that FE shows you the odds up front (sort of, most FE games aren't 1rn), while Pokemon makes you use an external tool to see them. IMO, the planning process is part of the *appeal* of Pokemon nuzlocking. You plan the fights out ahead of time, and then get to demonstrate your slick maneuvering and how everything's come together. It's a similar appeal to, say, watching a slick LTC. "Ugh, there's no suspense here, they know EXACTLY which order these enemies are going to attack in!" doesn't make weapon breaking strats any less cool.
I'd also argue that most FE games are a lot closer to being "solved" than how you present them here. Most of the games in the series can be beaten by creating a unit who doesn't die and then slowly and meticulously wading through each map. We as players tend not to actually do that because competing side objectives and recruiting everyone makes our brains happy. Even Conquest Lunatic can be pretty easily trivialized by reclassing Camilla to Maid and lowmanning nearly every map with her; Sceptistar has a run demonstrating that on her channel. Even if you're not lowmanning, the gameplay loop of a lot of FE games does tend to devolve into calculating how many enemies a unit can take on an enemy phase, putting a good unit on a spot that fights as many of those enemies as they can handle (and ideally snipes something on player phase), ending turn, healing them up, and repeating the process. Even player phase focused games tend to fall into this pattern, they just happen to return "0-1 units" from that calculation instead of "2-5 units". The difficulty of FE thus comes less from whether or not you can *beat* the game (unless you misplace your lord and your run suddenly ends), but whether or not you can beat it smoothly and/or stylishly (and have fun along the way, etc.). How many side objectives can you complete? How many funny builds can you assemble? Can you minimize deaths? Are you eschewing boss abuse and the Tower of Valni? In this way, I think Nuzlockes have similar secondary objectives, such as beating the game with a minimal number of deaths, holding off on using setup moves, and using low tiers.
I think the big difference is really just the number of decisions that can possibly be made and how they domino into subsequent turns. I don't necessarily disagree with your take but I personally avoid calcs for that reason.
The difference is that FE do not have a theorical randomness in your toolbox. Unless you want to run 50 calcs, how are you knowing what you will use againist a boss if the entire premise of this game mode is that you use whatever team the RNG gods bestow upon you? The obvious answer is that you are not using a random team, you are using a carefully crafted team by using every trick aviable to ignore one of the only 2 fundamental rules of a nuzlelocke. It is like doing a no hit run but allowing mechanic that allow you to make certain hits "not count". While at the same time cranking up the difficukty because a regular no hit is too easy.
Definitely agree with what you mention about how pokemon is just an objectively simpler and easier game than fire emblem, and that the mainline installments vary much more widely in terms of how their gameplay feels. And it's certainly true, anyone can beat any mainline pokemon game, no matter the restrictions you set on yourself. All of those clickbait "CAN YOU BEAT X POKEMON GAME WITH Y RESTRICTIONS" is obviously pretty trite and repetitive, and I agree that there will come a point when the well dries up and youtubers will have milked all the content they can get out of these games (unless pokemon releases a suitably innovative challenging game, lol yeah right) But the answer to one of these pokemon challenge runs is almost never "no you cannot beat this it's objectively impossible" because that's not really even the question, the question is what fights become harder when these pokemon are what you have access to? Is the early game a brutal wall that sees a bunch of attempts fail? How much can X pokemon shine in this kind of run? That's the kind of thing people watch for, and yeah I do agree, it gets very, very repetitive, trust me I feel it's a waste of time to watch most of these videos myself when I already know the answer. However, I do feel like it's a bit unfair to discredit any and all planning that goes into harder nuzlocke challenges of romhacks like run and bun or emerald kaizo just because that doesn't happen in the moment during the battle itself. I think that's just a difference of opinion honestly, I mean we know the people doing this planning are going to make an edited video on it anyway so why does it matter to you what they did to get there? You didn't have to sit there doing boring calcs figuring out the optimal play for hours, you watch an edited cut where the youtuber explains why the fight is so difficult, what the limitations are, why x pokemon is so threatening, and what they did to find a solution to get through that challenge At the heart I understand what you're getting at, because I'm the sentimental sort myself and I much prefer the days when nuzlocke content was all about running through the game blind, picking up and using whatever trash the routes handed to you, affectionately naming them all, growing attached to them as you used them to fight, and mourning them when you lose them (probably to a critical hit or a mon packing self destruct, explosion or destiny bond you didn't remember). Nuzlockes as a whole I feel were in a better place when they were reserved for multipart letsplays and comics that sought to flesh out that attachment a permadeath run sparked, but really, there's nothing stopping you from going back and playing one of these games, or even one of these harder romhacks blind (drayano hacks though, definitely not ek or run and bun), you don't have to look up anything, you don't have to calc anything, you control the buttons you press, if it's not fun for YOU, you don't have to do it. I understand after biting a piece of the forbidden fruit it might be hard to try and pretend like you don't have that knowledge, but it's practically impossible to remember the ins and outs of one of these games completely unless you've ran it a million times. Personally? I like the planning that can go into a tough fight to get the best outcome with the mons you have, I like plotting out encounters to take advantage of the routes available to me in order to up the chances of getting a very good mon, I like how even after calcs, a bad roll, or an unlucky miss, freeze, crit, etc. can force an even riskier play. It's personal preference, and it's fine for you to say you don't like it, and that the mass produced content about it is unappealing to you, but it's not like there's nothing to it. Good video overall, I've certainly felt the same feelings when it comes to nuzlocke content being better and more engaging in the old days and challenge runs of pokemon in general being a forgone conclusion, but I've sort've shed my apathy on that and taken a "live and let live" approach, and found things to enjoy about the newer style along the way. Sorry for the essay, TLDR: Projared's old fire red nuzlocke is still the best nuzlocke content on youtube
I get really bored of the modern style pokemon nuzlocke for exactly what you brought up, everything is calculated and it became all about the challenge and less about the pokemon, cuz to me, the original nuzlockes were more entertaining because it was people losing creatures they grew attached to because they made mistakes or got unlucky, it had even a slight bit of emotion, becoming a story of unlikely odds and the players flaws, and fit the series message of becoming attached to your team, hence why the nickname your pokemon rule existed, but now it's just trying to be strategy when the game isn't designed for strategy, where they just give joke nicknames and rig the game ahead of time to only get good encounters.
So, what you're saying is... we need a Pokémon Conquest sequel? It would be funny if that spinoff was part of the Pokemon to FE pipeline, and for many I'm sure it was, but it's still a very niche side game of a huge franchise that's very underappreciated
Agency mention 👀 On a serious note though, I do think the argument here is a bit reductive. I play both mons romhack nuzlockes and fe lunatic/maddening, and the things like planning a 100% line for a difficult fight are precisely what make nuzlocking fun. I can see why not everyone would find that fun, but it certainly can be. From a spectator perspective, watching someone execute their 100% line, especially when it makes use of some clever mechanic or niche item is entertaining because of the implicit understanding that it took a lot of knowledge/creativity to find that strategy. The "9 option" argument I think falls particularly flat for me, since the options/decision-making for any fight actually begin before the fight itself, in the selection of team members, moves, and items. Just sharing a few thoughts. Great vid though. Was a fun watch.
i get what you're saying here but im pretty sure the point of the "9 option" thing was to show that, after all the calcs and shit all you're doing is your "line" not actually reacting on fly in any meaningful way to create tension because you already calced that in your planning stream a day ago. In fe, like I can't plan if my rutger just get's stat screwed so I'm forced to use roy to kill a boss because he's the only one who hit a threshold or if my tank crit five times in a row and got god levels. In pokemon everything goes basically exactly as planned and even most rng based things can be accounted for.
I remember having a lot of fun planning for the Team Star Revarooms, or the Blueberry E4. Figuring out the best way to get my win conditions onto the field, the best way to support them, figuring out which Pokemon could take out the opponent with the least to lose in exchange, how to deal with certain problematic Pokemon. It's really fun.
I think part of the problem honestly might be the UA-camrs being unimaginative with the content. Excelblem really is great, and as far as Pokemon goes I love Scott's Thoughts he's the only one I watch anymore since he embraces the data-driven approach to playing Pokemon and is basically trying to refine Pokemon speedruns with each individual mon to see where they rank. His videos are about his journey of coming to the optimal strat given the entire toolbox of a playthrough (learnset, TMs and their locations, levelups and rare candies, etc...). While a turn or battle in Pokemon rarely has anything interesting going on, speeding through all that and looking at the playthrough as a whole can certainly be interesting. It just takes the right sort of framing. It's probably a bad idea in the first place to make a Pokemon video with the premise of "how hard is it to beat the game under X conditions?" You can do more with the games than that.
The past 3 Fire Emblem games (excluding Echoes) have all been wildly different games with significant differences in gameplay. The most different the modern Pokemon games have gotten is Legends Arceus (havent actually played it) and fans seem to like it and thats probably why people are excited for Legends Z-A. The pokemon games have really only changed their core gameplay once (Attack and SP Attack split) while introducing random gimmicks like mega-evolution, dynamaxing, and terrastilization that effect 1 pokemon per team and often times simplify battles rather than complicate them. (not talking competitively) For example, I was recently playing Pokemon Shield and picked Cinderace. Cinderace was decent all game but towards the late game it was extremely easy to steamroll through if I just dynamax > fighting move x3 for buffs or x2 and 1 fire move for weather > sweep. This could be because of all the steel types but so long as I wasnt hitting something immune or resistant (I wiped on Leon's Aegislash once because I wasnt paying attention to see that it wasnt effected by fighting because it was ghost) I was able to just power through everything else. Another facet is that you just tend to have more of a connection to the Fire Emblem characters because you use them like Pokemon but Pokemon dont talk and this can culminate in really tragic moments in FE runs where you or the streamer can mess up or randomly get crit and permanently lose a favorite character, having to hear their dying words can sometimes be icing on the cake too.
The problem with pokemon LA is ….. there’s no challenge here either! For a very long time all tamers you fight are using baby mons for far too long while you keep leveling up exponentially thanks to the open world nature. By the time you reach late game bosses you most likely have full army of level 80 each minimum. Now maybe some can argue “play the main missions exclusively if you want a challenge” but this will bring us back to square one, this is a self imposed challenge.
@DarkJ1425 I feel like if Legends was challenging, it might buckle under the weight of it's flawed combat system. Plus the game is more focused on catching Pokemon than the battling.
Oh god, you made me imagine the nightmare of being stuck with 6 Roys in any given FE games Also don’t recommend the hardcore Pokémon fanbase to switch over to the Fire Emblem fanbase, we are toxic enough as is
I would respectfully disagree that just because pokemon is “solved” while fire emblem is not, makes pokemon a worse series than fire emblem. Pokemon certainly is a much simpler game that is designed for young children in mind. Hardcore challenge runs were not in mind for the designers while making the games. They barely put enough time into making sure the games can be playable at this point. But fire emblem can be just as solved of a game with enough knowledge of mechanics. Because of how older fe games work (gba especially), there are ways to create a “perfect” run that can be duplicated identically. The rng in these older games is a lot less random than you’d think as it’s more of a set of pre determined numbers that can be skipped to create different outcomes. Not to mention a lot of the choices in fe can be pretty uniform in their outcome. A character might have 30 movement options, but 8 of them puts you out of range of the enemy, 18 more might put you in range of an enemy, and then the last few let you make an attack on your turn if you want. There are certainly more options that lend to more unique situations, but fe can be boiled down to its core just as much as pokemon. It even has the same lizard brain mechanics it tries to feed you in most games. Pokemon has the type chart, fire emblem has the weapon triangle. The game wants you to use the element that’s strong against the enemy, even when it isn’t your best option statistically. It wants you to use a diverse team in your playthrough, even if having a full team of gyarados/wyvern riders statistically will beat the game the fastest. I really don’t think pokemon is as solved as you think. It just feels repetitive and dull because of how bland pokemon is at it’s core. Fire emblem on the other hand feels better to play because the focus is on single player tactical combat instead of a monster collecting rpg, and has been appropriately polished in more ways. And it really shows with how fast pokemon pumps out games. Pokemon has released 9 major games and 4 dlcs on the switch while fe has had 2 games and 2 dlcs. Pokemon doesn’t want to and can never be as complex as fe simply because it’s not their focus
I think the statements made in the romhacking section pertaining to everything being optimized aren't entirely accurate. I'd disagree with the claim "There's no question of 'did I make the right choice'." It's very often that even the best nuzlockers don't come up with the best possible lines, and as such, there are many cases where a failure does prompt investigating other options. Additionally, there are few times where people map out every revelevant case; as such you get instances such as even Dekzeh in his winning attempt of Run & Bun (the romhack he created) steering during the E4 and having to win in unideal situations from a combination of not the best players in response to certain RNG cases. You can end up spending a few hours coming up with a "good enough" strategy for a boss fight, without having found the best or perhaps even any of the top 5 best lines. I don't exactly disagree however that a lot of challenge run content doesn't stand out all too much for me. Usually unless the challenge run video uses a large string of very creative ideas that I haven't seen before, it ends up being a pretty replaceable experience that doesn't stick with me all too much after watching it.
I'm so glad that Monster Hunter Stories exists so I never have to think about Pokemon ever again. That being said, I should definitely play more Fire Emblem games, even if permadeath scares me.
As stated before, permadeath is optional, in some games at least, iirc every game post-Awakening has a Casual Mode where lost units come back before the next chapter.
@@mauricioalvarezpino1818 most old games had the perma deaths in mind, bloody Thracia 776 is a prime example of that. Also all GBA games since they are raining you with units. Oh crap I remember the big one: Shadow Dragon on the DS, in that PoS you MUST kill your own units to get access to “gaiden” chapters. Otherwise you will never have a whiff of them. The God damn tutorial demands you to sacrifice a unit ffs.
Tbh I think that pokemon gameplay videos as a whole has burnt out for me, as someone who still loves pokemon. I always see the appeal in franchises with a brilliant variety of monster designs like pokemon. I think the problem is that combined with the very consistently used mechanics across games, most pokemon content is gameplay-centric. It feels like gameplay is the only part of pokemon that matters, and this applies especially to competitive pokemon if I have to be honest. While I don’t actually think pokemon shines most from gameplay, but it shines most from creativity. Honestly main series games having the battle system of pokken tournament would be perfect, yeah it may not fit as well but it 100% would solve the problem. As someone who absolutely loved scarlet and violet, the story being very influential to every second of pokemon would be perfect, and SV’s story imo is nearly perfect. At least on youtube, there’s practically no focus on content of pokemon’s stories, or characters in general. And even if there was, it’d always be the toughest to beat characters and because they’re tough to beat. I can get gameplay wise fire emblem having some things over pokemon but the variety and creativity aspect pokemon is king, in comparison to most if not all other franchises I’ve known about. I wish there was more focus on the content scale for that aspect of pokemon because that’s something that never was, never is, and never will be “solved” Also I tend to have a strong disliking towards classifying something that _can_ be played or watched by all ages as “for kids”
Honestly FlygonHG has some good storytelling within his nuzlockes (still remember the spheal video lol), that's what keeps me coming back to his channel specifically for that type of content, since typical nuzlocke content has run a bit dry. If he does decide to branch out to new content in the future, I'd definitely stick around for it.
10:27 its funny you mention that, because my biggest gripe with pokemon has been how limited your interactions with pokemon actually are. not asking for the most in depth animations or whatever, thatd be unfair, but literally every pokemon is the exact same in terms of behavior. i'd love if natures actually had meaningful impact on some of the flavor text when interacting with your pokemon, or in battle. i'd love if it impacted how they behave around you, if theyre the type to burst out of their pokeball on their own for funsies like you see in the anime, or to bring back X and Y's pokemon amie system, where they have favorite spots they like to be pet at, and spots they hate being interacted with. the issue with pokemon imo whenever they try and implement such features, is that they tend to make every aspect of it universal, and leaves any variety in reactions to the pokemon species themselves. they could add a million interaction options, but would sooner die than make it so you can get a pikachu that isnt smiling 99% of the time. i dont know, i guess i just wanna see the pokemon i catch as my unique buddies, not some drone that perfectly represents its entire species
I always think I’m being too hard on pokémon and then I play something like Monster Sanctuary or MH:Stories that proves you can do something interesting with the formula 😭😭 nintendo it’s okay to experiment you’ll get your $60 either way I promise
Monster hunter stories just proved pokemon games are too lazy to experiment. Play yokai watch and MH stories it just blew how much qualities different compares to pokemon
The most they did to improve Pokemon's formula was ORAS. That was *10. YEARS. AGO.* and what did GameFreak decide to do? Downgrade the formula until it required basically no thought in every game afterwards. Pokemon has long been past its golden years legitimately a decade ago. So no, people aren't being too harsh on it. If anything, people are _still_ going out of their way to give it way more passes than it deserves. If a franchise like SMT, which came out a DECADE before Pokemon happened, can still innovate and improve, Pokemon has no excuses PERIOD.
As someone who fell off HARD for about 2 years and just returned to it recently, I try to maximize these games' strengths and the reason I love Pokémon so much: teambuilding with meaningful variety. Like you said, from mom's house to the Hall of Fame is easy in every Pokémon game except maybe Emerald, Platinum and Ultra Sun & Moon. But I find the experience of placing goals and building your team towards these goals to be really satisfying. It's why I can stomach replays of S/V or love doing replays of Sw/Sh, even though I've been playing since gen 3 and do agree that map design peaked in the DS games. What 'mons will you get? Which roles will you fill out? Do you know when you'll get every TM and move you want? Held items? These are often scattered throughout the game, which gives me a little dopamine boost every time I achieve these objectives and try them out in gyms. It's a deckbuilder's wet dream, a "card game" RPG that distributes "cards" throughout the game, so you can experiment with them. But what REALLY ties these games together to me and why I dislike S/V is the Battle Tower/similar facilities. It's where I can FINALLY use legendaries and strong mons to meaningful effect, where teambuilding and raising choices matter the most, and introduces an addictive gameplay loop of obtaining BP and improving your team even more. BDSP has serious competition for being one of the best in the franchise to me because of how they nailed this. Introducing mints, ability capsule/patch and Hyper Training, along with breeding improvements from Gen 6 and 7, the hidden ability fest of Gen 5 and the many mechanical changes (Fairy typing, etc) made things so much more streamlined while still taking effort. However, it's of note that it becomes a 'guide game', meaning having Serebii or Bulbapedia open at all times to truly understand everything you're working for. Not only that, but the outside knowledge from places like Smogon and VGC is one of the main reasons I was actually able to do this. Fire Emblem is a fantastic game series, and it captures many of Pokémon's strengths while being baked in actually good videogames, as a whole. I'm a huge fan of FE3, the GBA games, Fates (yes) and Engage. Engage in particular I love so much; ignoring its FF4 tier story, there's so much mechanical customization and the game itself feels fantastic to play. But I don't feel like most FEs' mechanical depth matches Pokémon's - be it with self imposed challenges like Nuzlockes, the Battle Tower content or multiplayer (which I'm not really a fan of, having to pay and I kinda prefer going singleplayer in most games). There's just something about having the freedom to mold these creatures into roles and making each work within a team, minmaxxing every aspect of their being to be a better fighter that a weirdo like me just can't get enough of, when the game actually HAS a battle facility. The problem, again, is that the games are so, SO easy. Very rarely do they hint towards this mechanical depth,, SPECIALLY nowadays. I think S/V DLC does it? But they did such a mediocre job with the base game that I don't really care for buying it. Pokémon buries its biggest strength ten feet under and barely makes an effort to invest people who are not already invested.
And a quick note about self imposed challenges: I think it's wonderful that Pokémon has a mechanical flexibility to allow for them, and even think that Nuzlockes are fantastic for making the player work with something they don't. But I find the community's overreliance on them to be a bit weird. You CAN experience a Nuzlocke's mechanical variety and limitations without permanently killing your Pokémon, you just have to get out of your comfort zone and try out more stuff. Having a Pokémon permanently unusable, to me, defeats the purpose of experimentation. Unlike Fire Emblem, it's never a part of the setting or expected in any way. It feels too drastic to suddenly lose a member that was maybe one of your strongest. FE always has had limitations in place to try to push you to victory even with Permadeath: lord dying being a Game Over, prepromotes, the Gotoh archetype.. A Pokémon nuzlocke has to rely on the variety of encounters to suppress your losses, so the snowball effect can be much, much harsher. Anyway, I'll treat myself to the rest of the video. Your riffs on Pokétubers in the past were amazing, I couldn't stop laughing. Earned yourself a sub.
About calculating the chances for success, you're ignoring that Nuzlockes don't have everything guaranteed. Yes, some players map out encounters, but Pokémon is divided in two halves: teambuilding and battling. If you don't engage with teambuilding decisions, making it as simple as possible, then yes: Pokémon becomes incredibly simple and boring. The point of nuzlockes is to forcibly draw out the player's decision making through an artificial limiting of choice. The problem with Pokémon having so vast a choice pool is that building challenges for a specific player level becomes harder than in other games. That's why limiting yourself through nuzlocke rulings help, you're much more locked than usual. And frankly, you're making the nuzlockes seem much easier than they actually are. Yes, the more information you have the more you can prepare for it, but hardcore nuzlocke rulings make these games actually difficult. They are not as guaranteed as you're saying they are, people only succeed at them because of the available information and making the calcs. Making calcs might seem like an exaggeration, but it's what these games boil down to. The worse your position, the more you'll need to prepare to compensate for it. How can you do so with such a limited ruleset? That's the point of nuzlocking And lastly, yes, Fire Emblem dkes achieve this out of the box. But it is muuuch more predictable for the devs to balance it because there's less meaningful variety when compared to Pokémon.
I had a lot of fun replaying Pokemon S/V with a bunch of bug types (and Mimikyu) and learning that Leavanny can be quite the nasty sweeper with it's Fell Stinger, Charm and Sticky Webs. Mimikyu was an excellent Charm user thanks to it's Disguise. Unfortunately the strategy was a bit *too* good, and the game became pretty easy once Leavanny got set-up.
@@miimiiandco That sounds cool! One of my biggest surprises in S/V was discovering how effectively Masquerain can sweep, with decently high special attack, Quiver Dance and a great movepool. And exactly like you said, it feels like the games aren't prepared for us to make these discoveries. I'm usually content with building a strong team and tearing through the main campaign because Battle Facilities were guaranteed, and because the best options are usually unlocked later in most games (Masquerain's Quiver Dance is in the low 50s, Hydro Pumps, etc). Thanks to S/V's open world and set level curve, I feel like it's even easier to make the game too easy. Most battles don't feel like they show off their Pokémon's potential all that well, it tends to be a stompfest until you arrive at somewhere you're underleveled.
That putting the pressure on part reminds me, I think it'd be really cool if in the next fire emblem they do something like a turn timer since I often find myself on my phone for like 20 minutes during player phase just cause theres no need to focus like in an action game. And it wouldn't have to be some clock in the corner of the screen, maybe like its a boss power that only rarely shows up thoughout the game which you can see building up until he takes control from you to do an AOE attack, have an enemy phase thats just him(boring but reasonable), burn one of your turnwheel uses or if you're out just forcing all remaining units to wait( probably unfair but really cool)
Attaching a "speed-chess" style element to the game could be an interesting option or mode. You could even have it play into the, now pretty standard, rewind mechanics. If you don't want/need to use it for redo's, you can use it to extend the timer or something. I like the idea of a more soft or flavorful implementation like you mentioned, but I don't even think I'd mind a straight-up 'take to long, you forfeit your turn'. It'd definitely change how people play the game. Hell depending on how familiar you are with the game, that could even make lower difficulties pretty hard.
Great video! I feel like you perfectly explained why I've been finding Pokemon challenge runs so stale these past couple of years. They can be tons of fun to watch for sure, but they're also so limiting. Fire Emblem Ironmans are way more varied by comparison. One other aspect you may have missed is that, with exception to low IV's and adjustments with nature's, Pokemon stats are virtually the same with each run. Whereas with Fire Emblem the growth rates and who you choose to give stat boosters to can drastically alter a playthrough. I get a strength-screwed FE9 Boyd? Bench him and try using Brom as a dedicated axe fighter! Truly one Ironman run is not the same as another.
I still play Pokémon for the attachment. Building a team of scrappy weirdos, and taking them to the top. Hell, I even managed to make the fight against the rock guy from Shining Pearl engaging by pretty much playing wrong accidentally. (had to eek out a win by making him waste his pp) What you're saying rings true though. Pokémon has been conquered. Wonder if GF will manage to switch it up.
When I was a kid I would accidentally play monopokemon challenges because I can beat every game with whatever my favorite pokemon is at the time by spamming its non-ineffective attack moves.
I've tried 3 Nuzlockes in my life and I never lost any of them, but never completed any of them because I lost interest within the first 3 gyms. The constant near mandatory grinding of shitters was boring, and the need to "plan" every fight, lest you risk a random mon fainting and sending you back to the grind dungeon, is mentally exhausting and grinds the game to a halt. The appealing aspect of a Nuzlocke to me is supposed to be gaining a new appreciation for pokemon you neglected, but all the rules and restrictions you place on yourself just kind of places you in an environment where experimenting and having fun is just going to get you punished, so I'd rather just run a game casually with a new unconventional team on my own volition without the bloat.
When Soda brought up drama created my challenge runs I remembered my first playthrough of FE Engage when it first came out, I played classic and imposed a challenge on myself the if a unit dies, I must throw out all of the items in their inventory and if they have and emblem equipped, I would be unable to use that emblem till the next time the emblems were returned. And the drama that was created was Alear being my only unit left for like the last three levels because I'm not the best at fire emblem especially on my first playthrough
I like to think there's a universe where Fire Emblem was Nintendo's biggest RPG and not Pokémon. It just makes so much sense given that both franchises have a lot of appeal, but Fire Emblem actually improved over time.
I’ve said this before but Pokemon challenge runs are essentially gambling. Your choices and options are so limited that you have to rely on RNG to win. There is no skill in beating a Kaizo Ironmon Nuzlocke because you’re just resetting the game until you get lucky enough to find a Pokemon with good base stats and get good damage and crits rolls. All RPGs have that luck/gambling factor to them but in other games you don’t have to rely on RNG to win. In other RPGs your stats aren’t random. They give you characters with set base stats and say “You can play them as is or use these many different mechanics to create a unique version of the character no one else has ever made. You can even grind to max base stats if that’s what you want”. Pokemon says “Here’s a character but their defense base stat is low. No matter what you do that mon is going to have permanently bad defense forever”. If I play Dragon Quest or Shin Megami Tensei/Persona and my defense stat is too low the developers put in different ways to increase my defense stat. That I as a player have to discover on my own or ask for help from a friend or the internet. The RNG is minimized because the game gives you multiple solutions to having bad stats. Not just tough luck your defense is bad forever.
@@seriousbacon3676 It really doesn’t. Kaizo Ironmon Nuzlocke is just pulling numbers out of a hat and hoping to win. All the strategies people have used to win have nothing to do with the skill of the player but the math and RNG presented by the game. Being skilled at Kaizo Ironmon Nuzlocke is like saying you’re skilled at BINGO or Roulette. Sure there are things you can do to help your chances of winning but the odds are so determinant on luck that what you do doesn’t matter. The player lacks agency and is at the whims of the RNG lottery.
When your options as that ludicrously limited in a ludicrously hard game, no wonder you have to resort to cheap tactics like that. I will say that vanilla Pokemon basically never requires RNG to beat a challenge because of it's lax difficulty, unless you push the game to it's limits by doing a Magikarp only run or something.
Even if I did like Pokémon, whenever I see a video thumbnail of "I died several hundred times trying to beat this mod," I always wonder if this is even fun.
I started playing Thracia 776 recently (ironman). Got my first game over on 4x. I already know that I will be hyped to replay the game. I am in fact, keeping a notebook to assist my knowledge gap between now and next playthrough
Thracia gotta be the worst fire emblem game to play blind for the first time. It becames way more manageble when you know what you are doing and when reinforcements will suddenly appear
I agree with you, and further, I find it frustrating that Pokemon acknowledges their aging fanbase, but still chooses not to implement any features for them. In fact, they tend towards removing features they like instead, like set mode. They choose not to be creative and come up with any new game modes or challenges. And worse it seems they've almost entirely dropped double battles and other such mechanics.
hmm while i generally agree with this take i will say that double battles are a poor example as the hardest challenge in the recent games was the s/v dlc bb league which consisted of only double battles think kieran
It's really weird how few double battles there are and how little emphasis is put on them, while doubles is also the official competitive format, and most balance decisions revolve around doubles.
That mountain range comparison really hits the nail on the head. And that range grows impossibly wide once you get into rom hacks and fan games. As a fan game developer myself, it's hard to even express just how massive the variety is out there. If anyone reading this wants a reccomendation on where to start with this scene, I'd go with Vision Quest by pandam.
Funny you mention the Pokemon to Fire Emblem fan pipeline, because that's pretty much exactly what happened to me. I still enjoy (old) Pokemon mostly because I like shiny hunting, but I enjoy Fire Emblem as a series far more. Also Imported Cheese mentioned - that ironman was a blast to watch.
Even though i love Pokemon, even Scarlet and Violet because Scarlet and Violet have my favorite Story and characters in the series, its a really cool interesting take from a fire emblem fan.
I feel like Minecraft has the exact same problem to Pokemon in that the game isn't designed with challenge runs in mind. Minecraft isn't made to put arbritrary rules in place to make beating the Dragon harder, it's made so that people can express their creativity by building pretty things. Pokemon is the same. The games' difficulty is designed in such a way that any player can use any strategy they desire and have a fun time. Blasting through the game with Garchomp and Ogerpon is just as valid as using your favourites, or challenging yourself with weak Pokemon like Castform or Beedrill. I tried using Leavanny, and I learnt that it's a really cool and unique Sticky Webs sweeper. With Charm support and Fell Stinger, it can really put in the work. My win condition shifted a lot towards setting up Leavanny to sweep, and it was fun using a sweeper like that - I haven't really tried it in Pokemon before. That was what was fun - learning a new strategy with a new Pokemon.
You hit the nail on the head at 20:43 I think Pokémon is enjoyed for its familiarity but longtime fans would also enjoy if it was shaken up which hopefully legendsza does well. I will say the video feels too long for how simple your point is, fire emblem is obviously more challenging but that isn’t necessarily the appeal of Pokémon. People who’ve stuck around with Pokémon enjoy it for its familiarity. I think it would be interesting if you showed how you personally changed from a Pokémon fan to a FE fan and what you have learned from playing FE
I played Pokemon blue when I was a wee little lad and absolutely loved it. I loved it so much that I started getting every game that came after it. It wasn't until Pokemon White that I came to the conclusion that they are all the same and there is no point in getting any future games.
Perfectly said what i agree, the current state of nuzlocking is a joke, prioritizing content over having fun, where every nuzlocke is preplanned, abusing rare candies and just made for X video. Long gone are the days of just nuzlocking for fun
At first I disliked this video because it's just way too easy to point out the decreasing quality of a game constantly getting screwed over by it's publisher's release dates and stating the obvious that a strategy game is more complex, but your point shifting more towards the social aspect got me. People try way too hard to make themselves seem cool for only liking an easy jrpg with all the edgy jokes and challenge runs. I'm the end, that was a very good video with many solid arguments.
I've been saying this for a while now! I've actually done an entire essay on this in the past. Anyways, I completely agree. And it's for that reason that I think of Karen's quote when you beat her in HGSS: "Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled Trainers should try to win with the Pokémon they love best.” As you hoped to have illustrated in this exhaustively long essay, this is total bull at the absolute best case scenario. None of Pokémon is designed on a gameplay level from doing anything but using the strongest Pokémon in games that demand it difficulty-wise, yet it still thinks that those emotional attachments are core to the series’ ethos when the gameplay just objectively doesn’t reflect it in that sense. Which is jarring in contrast to Fire Emblem, which despite far higher difficulty, does back this up and does have its units be mutable in ways that Pokémon simply isn’t, and unless a fundamental overhaul happens for Pokémon, it likely won’t ever will be. And for one more nail in the coffin, take the first game and consider Blue and Giovanni, the first being your rival who when you ultimately defeat him is told he doesn't love his Pokémon enough and that's why he lost, and the second being a crime boss. Sure, the aesop comes out on top since you're the one who won those fights, but these two people are the former Pokémon League Champion and the 8th Gym Leader, two of the most prestigious titles of the whole region. So friendship might be the best, but you can sure get far without it if you try. It's disappointing, too, because I used to love Pokémon, but reasons entirely irrelevant to the point of this essay - namely, the dubious quality of the recent games - have made me fall out of love with the series. No matter how much you love your Pokémon, no matter how much I love Mightyena, I can’t use them in way that’s good if they’re that inherently awful, and if the game really is about emotional attachments, why rob that flexibility and balance? Just because Pokémon is objectively impossible to balance doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted. Overall, it just makes me appreciate Fire Emblem more in a way that Pokémon doesn’t have; that flexibility. That ability to interact. That connection. The difference between Pokémon and Fire Emblem is overall a very fundamental one despite both being about love and attachments; Fire Emblem lets you break through those limits while Pokémon doesn’t. And if both series are all about those attachments, there’s simply no reason to waste time with Pokémon in that regard over Fire Emblem when one is simply far more intricate and well-thought in that message than the other ever will be. Great video! Instant sub.
Karen's quote works out when you consider that EVERY pokemon is viable in the games they are a part of. You absolutely can, and should battle and win using your favorites. The fact that this isn't possible in online matches where there is a definitive meta is irrelevant to the actual games themselves. I don't think much more needs to be said. If you love Mightyena, it is entirely viable in every single game. If you leave it out to die against a Zacian using play rough, that's a fault of your own, as there is a reason why you have 6 team members. Intimidate is one of the best abilities in the game, and if you play after gen 5, then moxie is an option for sweeping as well. Give it Crunch, an elemental fang, taunt and swagger, and it will serve you well in any game you play. Would you be better off using other dark types? Maybe, but so what?
There was a nuzlocke I saw years ago of Pokemon firered. It was such a rollercoaster and one of the best yt series I’d ever seen. It’s too bad the human spirit of nuzlockes on youtube has been squeezed out by professional elitist challenge runners.
At this point, watching X challenge with Y rules aren't even about the difficulty or feasibility of the challenge anymore, except for extremely rare cases. It's about finding someone whose voice and vibe you gel with and can listen to as they act like a goof for 30m to 3h playing a video game in a way no one was meant to. This goes well beyond Pokemon and Fire Emblem.
BW2 feels the most like a JRPG of the Pokemon games. XP trends with your level vs the enemy's, you are rewarded for exploring optional areas, and while the game is easy it still tests your knowledge of the game's many mechanics. It gives you a lot of flavorful spins on the norm with the usage of double/triple/rotation battles (Painfully underutilized in modern games, even ORAS which is a remake for the games that LITERALLY INVENTED DOUBLES). The difficulty is not what the games are missing, it's the SPICE.
Nuzlockers are very comfy about the way Pokémon works. Complexity increases exponentially in a game where all the battles are in doubles format. However, you will hear nuzlockers complain about a difficult doubles experience because of the lack of certainty in a turn. Another example of Radical Red, which is considered to be a bad nuzlocke experience at the highest difficulty, but that isn't the remotely design intent.
I feel like you're a bit biased with pokemon to a extent, but one thing that pisses me off about main series that you didn't talk about is the fact that, since the AI is terrible at it's job, A LOT of the difficulty comes from the levels of the trainers and not their Pokemon or their strategies If you grind a little you can easily just beat everything, when I decided to play more RPGs, even grinding didn't solve the problem of difficult fights, most of the time I actually needed to think for my strategy to actually work
Hey, recent subscriber crumb bum here! Gonna unveil a shocking revelation to you: Most video games are DESIGNED TO BE BEATEN BY HUMANITY! Or solved, as you said. And I don't mean to be sardonic towards you. It's something younger folk don't seem to quite understand. You spend a lot of time as a young gamer putting laurels in your wreath, maybe even cultivating some of your identity on being really good at video games. Truth is, though, these games were solved already by the people who made them. Oh, sure, the devs might suck when playing them for real without godmode or whatever, but the truth is, outside of the aberrations(and many OLD arcade style games), games are designed to be beaten. This doesn't mean our efforts are meaningless, but it does mean that when staying true to concept, it should be no surprise that games are beatable by SOMEONE. Part of what actually makes Fire Emblem so appealing is that it has a perpetual gambling and brothel atmosphere built into it. Usually, to succeed with sub par units that you may(probably) feel attached to, you either need to spend a lot of time or a lot of risk with them. There's a butt ton of psychological mechanisms that take hold of people when they play Fire Emblem (Waifus Waifus Waifus). Pokemon, on the other hand, as you alluded to countless times, puts you in the perspective of a child. Your main characters in every Pokemon are children. Your attachment only goes as far as the creatures' appeal does to you, and that appeal can fade. Unlike in Fire Emblem, where you can fantasize about your fantasy wife who also happens to be able to wield a lance the size of a Sycamore and kill 20 beefy men without breaking a sweat. Without as many plays at psychology, Pokemon itself is less gripping than Fire Emblem. Without an appeal to maturity, Pokemon will forever sit where it's at, and it's executive board seems content with that. Of course, remember that even the first generations of Pokemon sold in the double digit millions, and you realize why that is. There's no fixing what ain't broke.
Funny thing when pokemon did make a hard mode and they screwed it up in major way as enemy pokemon have higher levels but not stats (not counting pokemon only on hard mode) meaning you just level up faster than before with pokemon that same stats as there normal mode version.
Some Pokemon fans can be so weird sometimes. Fans raged when bdsp added an exp share because "it nuked the difficulty" without knowing the new exp formula more than compensated for it when in reality the game got easier because they got 15 years older. Then they raged that the elite 4 was too hard because the developers actually made a challenge.
I like the video, you make some good points, but I do want to say that challenge runs aren't the only content out there based on pokemon. as you mentioned there's a very active competitive scene which has no problems at all finding enough interesting and complex mechanics. the competitive scene us is also constantly changing, every gen has their own competitive scene even after all this time. and while I do agree that competitive pokemon is very reliant on outside tools, it is also still just as much reliant on the pokemon games. each generation brings new mechanics and interactions that shake up the competitive scene. But really there is another way of engaging with the games that I personally like. if you are a completionist there are few better franchises to play than pokemon. we have not yet reached the emerald kaizo peak in that sense simply because the peak is nearly infinitely high with things like shinies, ribbons, marks, high stats, etc. I do get why completionism is not interesting to some people, since the challenge comes from it not being difficult but from it taking a long time, but personally it has kept me interested in the franchise for a very long time.
I think using outside tools for competitive Pokemon is totally fair, since the game becomes a whole lot more interesting when you're playing against a human player that can make complex decisions and make predictions rather than a dumb AI that will always do the exact same thing. Calculating against a player is using a tool to help inform your decision, and they can do the exact same thing to you. Calculating against an AI just solves the fight for you
I do think the Mainline Shin megami tensei games are also a good place to look if your looking something more challenging than pokemon whilst still being a monster collection turn=based rpg
At this point, solo runs arent "Can X Pokemon beat X Region," they're "*what does it look like* when X pokemon beats X region" ... Now I want to see Robin solo FE7.
I agree with a lot of what was said here, and this is coming from someone who is an avid Pokemon challenge runner and Fates Conquest "major" as you put it. I'm by no means amazing at both but completing a Hardcore nuzlocke with No EVs and all the general rulings of any vanilla pokemon game is far easier than any lunatic conquest run that I've done. That being said at the end of the day I still enjoy these challenges even if pokemon is "solved." I don't generally use calcs or anything like that so my experience is likely better than others and I try to be less calculated with the decisions that I make, but all of these things are entirely induced by me and not the game or the rules that I'm using. With all of that being said, I still prefer conquest to any pokemon title.
I am not gonna defend pokemon but this feel like the most bias take i ever seen...this week Every Fire Emblem has been utterly deconstructed to the point that if you make the effort to investigate you can find the perfect way to beat each game in the most optimal way. From the best characters, growths, most efficient weapons, the speed baseline to double, to hard mode bonuses, etc. Most people that play Nuzlockes, do it with a basic planner app, not different than SMT fans playing with the fusion calculator or FE fans with huge sheetspreed of growths. Is base pokemon easy? Yes, and i an truly hoping for a flop so the pokemon company improve its games but to say that there is no player expression or challenge in a basic playthrough is false. Especially when the FE fandom, since the beggining, has had a META problem which make high level gameplay little variety.
What are irritates me the most about Pokémon is how they still refuse to do voice acting. They have said the reasons why but they are so blatantly bad. Even when fire emblem was on its deathbed, they still had the budget to do voice acting on the damn 3DS The only thing Pokémon excel at compared to fire emblem is the community aspect surrounding their titles
I don't like Nuzlockes at all and never have or will due to how they fundamentally go against game mechanics,. But I like challenge runs, not for the 'challenge' but just for doing something different. The entertainment factor isn't about 'can I do it' as much as 'how will I do it'. That being said, I don't care to see Pokemon be made harder and competitive does less than nothing for me in every way. I think if people try to approach Pokemon challenges as actual challenges and not just fun alt ways to play then that's a problem.
The only pokemon challenges I can watch are the single-mon 'time trials'; they *admit* that the games are piss-easy, and instead look at *how* easy a Pokemon can make the game in comparison to other Pokemon. The lack of options also means that making Pokemon hard basically means "make it as unfair as possible". Difficulty hacks have to give enemies tons of options the player doesn't have access to, often meaning the first 1-3 gyms are the hardest part because the AI has 60 BP coverage while you have 40 BP STAB options at best. They also make the game not play like you played it as a kid. If I have to train a specific team for the second gym because it's only 'solvable' with a small subset of the options available at that point... and then have to do the same thing for the third gym... I'm not playing with *my* team of six. I also think that Pokemon doesn't have enough randomness and enough 'backup' options. You *have* to optimize a sufficiently hard Pokemon game down to "as long as I don't get crit I'm good" because you don't have to option to take an action, then react to the results. In FE I can go for an 80% attack on an enemy that *has* to die this turn, and if it fails I can pour a second and third units turns into finishing him off. In Pokemon a miss or an enemy crit (which you can usually get to 0% in FE, but outside of a handful of abilities and one move can't turn off in Pokemon) creates a much 'sharper' swing. So you want to avoid those 80% die rolls as often as possible. I don't even try for "hard" in Pokemon. I just want minor updates so that enemies feel about as challenging for adult me with knowledge of STAB and IV/EVs as the games did for 10yo me who knew the type chart.
The popular romhack scene in general feels like a massive overcorrection from both mainline pokemon and early fan creations. Gone are the days of drayono, where you could make a challenging game which added content that benefited the game while still feeling authentic to the region the game is from. Now it's almost entirely about challenge and content, regardless of how well either of those things benefit pokemon. It'd be harder to name a rom hack that didn't add all pokemon 1-8 into a single region, and gave every gym leader 6 pokemon, than it would be to name one that did, and that is a shame. Interesting creations like emerald rogue and unbound just kind of get shafted in favor of overdone, flawed concepts, just because the main games don't do it.
I remember being into nuzlocke videos until eventually I realized that the answer to every "can I beat this game with this restriction?" is "yes".
UA-camrs should normalize piblishing failed runs. I am very happy every time i see one.
I think the appeal is “How can I beat this game with this restriction”
Tbf, some of them do become “how many times do I need to break this restriction to beat the game” midway through.
@@LtJackStone Even the crazy Zelda randomizers MajinPhil does are sometimes unbeatable.
@@noukan42 Drxx posts his failed runs
Nuzlockes weren't cool because of the _difficulty,_ it was cool because it felt like Pokemon... You catch the Pokemon you happen to run into, you name them, and train them up to beat the Elite 4 and become champion. If they die, its like losing a dear friend... It leads to people being able to tell amazing stories with the Pokemon they adventured with.
But now... Pokemon Nuzlockes kinda forgot the whole appeal of the challenge. :/
People like nuzlockes for different things. Seeing how someone beets a fight with what they have is interesting to others.
Agreed, I actually made a video about that a long time ago. I think nuzlockes definitely still have a place and can be interesting to new players or players who haven't learned enough game knowledge to trivialize the game. The story aspect was what made nuzlockes fun and interesting. Using the nuzlocke rules strictly as a challenge run removes that personal aspect, and exposes nuzlockes as kind of a nothing-burger of a challenge, since Pokemon's campaigns just aren't complex enough for them to be meaningfully challenging.
People who like nuzlockes for difficulty and people who like nuzlockes for story/content can co-exist
You can have both
People can like the same thing for different reasons
It just takes imagination. I did a complete playthrough of Violet regular and Scarlet half-nuzlocke (no permadeath). Scarlet half-nuzlocke was more fun cause I added story to them.
The adorable, clumsy "starter" shiny Shinx evolving to brave leader Luxray.
The Pawniard who developed from a bratty, bougie, stuck up child making fun of the Meditite I caught to a brave, hard to tell their emotion Kingambit.
Meditite grew from a timid, eccentric, bullied kid to the meditative, powerful Medicham who Pawniard wants to become a Kingambit to impress since they fell in love with each other.
Imagination is key
Both are valid. Personally I prefer difficulty hacks as they test my skills and make me prep and plan fights. It's like a puzzle.
Demeaning people who see nuzlockes differently is both ridiculous and divisive. You can like one while respecting the other. Both have followings.
pokemon is the checkers and fire emblem is the chess
This brings up an interesting question. How do I Nuzlocke checkers?
Pokemon is a Rock Paper Scissors game lmao
@@DrCoeloCephalo for babies
Checkers is more complex than Pokemon 😂
@@-lord1754 actual fact
Okay but being completely honest the fact that Pokemon UA-camrs have to resort to heavily modifying the game in order to pump out a video is damning
They wouldn't do it if it didn't get so many views tho tbh
It was happening for a very long time, it just that prior to the nuzlocking scene being cleansed by hardcore nuzlocke being introduced it was instead "super extreme randomizer nuzlocke of pokemon sun episdoe 1" Where they then cheat to get some crazy encounter at the start of the run so people will watch it.
Vanilla nuzelocke were pretty much dead as a concept for at least 15 years.
Not as damning as you think. Mario (including Wonder and Odyssey), Kirby (despite the bonus modes which are fairly difficult), Fire Emblem, Sonic (largely to fix games but also add challenge), Zelda (ranges from multiplayer to randomisers), Resident Evil (randomisers), Smash (too many for me to name) and Devil May Cry (mainly for 2, 3, DmC and 5) all have an abundance of modded content that I've seen featured by challenge runners, skill players or speedrunners.
Pokemon depends on it more to cross the finish line of making an interesting playthrough, but this is the modern YT climate to a degree even with games which are console locked.
Not all roads will lead to Kaizo, but it is common for primarily single player games to look for more spice.
Personally find that all a Poketuber needs is to make a wacky character to roleplay as on their pokemon journey. It’s pretty funny. My personal favourites are Team Sky and Keegan J
Why is it damning..?
It's trully hilarious (for me) that the reasons why crab doesn't like nuzlockes and nuzlocke vídeos are exactly why i like them so much. And i can't even say he is Wrong for seeing those things as problems
i think the main problem of pokemon rom hacks is that they do not meddle with the AI. Despite the first 3 gens being completely open source (with gen 4 and BDSP on the way), the games still use the original ai, and at most up the diffuclty to use the champion AI for every battle, but they never go past that, so the game never makes use of SWITCHING, arguably one of the most important mehcanics in the game (shadow tag is banned in comp for this reason), and a lot of challenge runs go down to how much you can cheese the AI with the shit you caught and hope rng doesn't screw you over
IIRC, some pokemon fan games (made in their own engines) do actually refine the AI. I think Reborn has a pretty good one?
Pokemon Tectonic completely rewrote the AI and it's a very enjoyable challenge
Ai are hard to improve, but giving them better mons and moves is easier and less time consuming . The only way to make a hard Ai is make it random
@@to-ma-to4370 simply incorrect a random ai is unpredictable but that doesn't make it hard as it will often misplay in situations where it could easily win
Multiple difficulty hacks do use updated AI, it's just that it's often used in accordance with basically cheats that allow the AI to sometimes see what you are doing before settling on a move. Without it, the AI can only be improved so much.
Recently someone made a video of beating every seed of pokemon platinum. They simulated a billion seeds and created a set of inputs that would beat the game under any circumstances.
Yes, we, as a species, beat Pokemon Platinum in its entirety.
Excelblem mentioned 🗣🔥🔥🔥
*RAAAH WHAT THE FUCK IS HAVING A HEALTHY ARMY SIZE* 🗣🗣🗣🔥🔥🔥
I think you make a good point - Pokémon really isn't designed around challenge, so trying to stretch it to make challenge runs is not going to be easy. However, I imagine that part of the problem with the UA-cam scene is oversaturation and lack of imagination. Looking to Fire Emblem as an example, I kinda think something like a draft race could work - get together a group of Pokétubers with system knowledge, and have them pick a team of things that only they can use, then speedrun. But everyone's so focused on a narrow range of existing challenge runs that it's just getting stale.
On another note, I don't think I agree with that guy you quote, because for me, the optimisation is the fun part. I think there's a parallel with Fire Emblem there, too: LTC is something that fascinates me, and the core of LTC is planning, not execution. Like with the Pokémon runs you mentioned, every move has already been planned out ahead of time, and to me that doesn't take away from the breadth of choices that needed to be selected from in either case. Yes, Pokémon has fewer, but reducing it down to "there are no choices" just because the chosen option comes from pre-analysis and system knowledge is, imo, wrong.
For what it's worth, I think the equivalent of the Kaizo Emerald run is probably New Mystery Lunatic+ 0% growths, which has now been done. I doubt anything is ever going to top that in terms of challenge in Fire Emblem. You're probably right that it doesn't solve all Fire Emblem in quite the same way, but it's still something that, imo, makes all other challenge runs pale in comparison.
"1 Man could never solve Fire Emblem" tell that to dondon151
I said man, not god
Coming from Pokémon, I LOVE the fact that each Fire Emblem game is unique, even when I DON'T LIKE the way a title handle certain mechanics I know there's a DOZEN other entries more in line for what I like or, hell, even just a dozen ways to enjoy the games I actually like, it's so refreshing moving to the GBA games to Echoes, to Path of Radiance, to Awakening and loving and hating each game for it's own merits, not just a diferent flavour of the same fucking game
How can you watch a 6 hour Ironman "highlight" where no one even dies?! Especially not Lilina...
Great video, but you'll be hearing from my Nintendo Ninja team for PLAGIAZRING my original sentence about going from your mom's house to the hall of fame.
modern nuzlockes make me sad. they all feel so inorganic. the point of nuzlockes was to use pokemon you wouldn’t normally use and have things be unpredictable. now I see shit like calcs and repel manips, and it’s like they robbed any sort of authentic experience out of it. I think moving away from the comics people made to cramming an entire nuzlocke into one video was a mistake
I gotta mostly disagree, but I respect your opinion and understand it, I think the use of calcs and repel manipulation is part of the fun in nuzlockes, but not using them is also totally fine, calcs is just preparing and planning out the fights to come but it’s a bit overkill in a vanilla game, and repel abusing is just preparing an encounter, just like someone would for example skip a route to get a future encounter to guarantee a certain Pokémon in the route skipped, is just planning out and using the tools that the game gives you, and if someone doesn’t wanna do that it’s totally fine. The point of nuzlockes being in a single video is just that the people who make them started learning how to play the game better, not lose Pokémon in non important fights, and because of that just not have as much to say like in the past, like if someone did a nuzlocke series spanning on multiple videos where all they said was “I beat random trainer 1, I beat random trainer 2, I beat random trainer 3… all without losing a single Pokémon and barely getting damaged thanks for watching” isn’t fun, people are just getting to the point of the nuzlockes, important fights and when something happens in those random battles like a loss of a Pokémon or a close moment they normally mention it. And for your final point the loss of the comics, that is actually something I agree with, they were charming and creative but redundant today when you can just show the run in a video. (Sorry if it’s hard to read in some parts, my English isn’t the best)
One of the big reasons i don't like watching pchal is that i felt like it missed one of the big points: the reason naming Pokemon is a rule was to make an emotional attachment. It was to make you fall in love with scovillain because your starter died right before the water gym and thank arceus Pepper didn't low roll those bullet seeds because if she did this run was over.
Then he told everyone and their mother to take the rare candy pill and there's just- no connection to the Pokemon anymore.
I fell in love with nuzlockes because a UA-camr had an entire 40 episode series about his run and between every episode and after every grinding session he was telling stories about what his Pokemon were doing between episodes. When his starter got hit with an ohko move right before victory road we FELT it. That just isn't there anymore.
Pc is has stuff like pilot the swellow. Challenge nuzlocks are about solving the battles, thier are still moments like what you are talking about.
I'll have to disagree with you on this one.
The way I see it, calcs and repel manips are just extra assurance to make sure, similar to looking up reinforcements and enemy stats beforehand. I do understand why you nay not like calcs, but competitive players and nuzlockers alike use them all the time, and use of them is often encouraged.
Yeah I agree. I don't like that a lot of them are 'i will get after 2 min 38 seconds and 16 frames for 6 perfect IV mudkip!' especially when it's on the vanilla games.
I was enjoying chaotic meatballs shiny lock and even watching his streams until he started using a computer to hunt for him or manipulations. I get it but I'd rather watch a person hunt on 8 screens then watch them play Yu-Gi-Oh while a computer hunts.
It's pretty weird how in my mind, Kirby feels like a series of games more enjoyable to a wider age group than Pokemon, which just feels like baby's first RPG.
Probably because it has some semblance of quality, challenge and new ideas introduced that don't just last a single generation.
this isnt even mentioning the hundreds of fire emblem fan games that change up the gameplay significantly
Even some really minor changes can shake things up. I'm playing Shadow Dragon but I gave bows 2-3 range (and added a couple 1-2 range "daggers" for sword=locked units) and that single change buffs archers, nerfs jav/handaxe spam and nerfs fliers.
I love Pokémon and play it all the time! Coincidentally, I generally like easy and simple games without much intensity. I prefer the aspect of using my imagination as I play to make it feel like an exciting adventure.
Based.
while i do think pokemon would be better trying to capture the feel of adventure rather than pure difficulty, they dont really do that either? there is no side activities anymore, the locales are tiny, and the world is poorly designed.
@@comyuse9103 well they dont need to be large. At least in the older games. You can make a whole bunch of space, but what on earth could you put in it that isnt already there?
@@josephbulkin9222 NPCs? side quests? activities? one of the main cities in SWSH had 3 buildings and a gym. nothing else. they need to be bigger.
@@josephbulkin9222 Additional tasks, stories, characters, easter eggs, powerups?
People constantly describe loving games because there is something to do around every corner. Metroidvania's thrive on this with powerups. RPG's do this with quests. Life/farming sims just pack things with alternative game loops (mining, fishing, cooking, festival minigames, dating, haggling, etc).
I think whats funnier about pokémon too is when it does introduce hard challenges (e.g battle frontier), players have been so spoonfed the entire game and things like EVs, IVs, natures, eggmoves have never been properly communicated to the player that most players won't touch those harder postgame facilities because they get their side wheels removed and get wiped without any feedback of what they did wrong.
Is it a coincidence that the best nuzlocke videos are from players who aren't poketubers and are playing essentially blind. Chaos makes for good content.
Side note that's why I don't look up anything when I'm doing a Nuzlocke except for level caps every freaking battle takes the challenge and fun out of it
I feel that this is one of the things most people already knew but didn't want to talk about because they didn't want to be a party pooper or they're coping about it, so it's good to hear somebody finally talk about it.
They are different games
Prove it no speek it
I’m glad you mentioned fates when talking about mechanical differences in fire emblem games. I finished my first birthright run and then went to play conquest for the first time. I was not expecting such a different experience. It’s really interesting
Both Pokemon and Fire Emblem suffer from the same issue of "optimizing the fun out of the challenge" in challenge run contexts. Much like how you can solve a lot of Pokemon Nuzlockes with a calculator, you can solve Fire Emblem Ironmans with a calculator and a map with AI behaviors documented.
"Dude, just Chrobin solo Awakening. Only use E-rank weapons on Conquest. Just spam Wyvern Lords in 3H. Stats and skills only matter on 0% growths."
I'm sick of it all.
Very true. Bold to throw stones at dragons when you live in a house of jagens.
Thank you for pointing out that nuzelockes are anti-thetical to the core identity and themes of pokemon lol.
That is honestly why I never bothered to do nuzelockes myself.
I like some of the points you made in this video, but I think the anti-calc stance is a bit... weird? I don't see running the calcs as being any different from reading the damage forecast (or counting up how much damage you expect to take over enemy phase before committing your move) in a Fire Emblem game. The difference is largely that FE shows you the odds up front (sort of, most FE games aren't 1rn), while Pokemon makes you use an external tool to see them.
IMO, the planning process is part of the *appeal* of Pokemon nuzlocking. You plan the fights out ahead of time, and then get to demonstrate your slick maneuvering and how everything's come together. It's a similar appeal to, say, watching a slick LTC. "Ugh, there's no suspense here, they know EXACTLY which order these enemies are going to attack in!" doesn't make weapon breaking strats any less cool.
I'd also argue that most FE games are a lot closer to being "solved" than how you present them here. Most of the games in the series can be beaten by creating a unit who doesn't die and then slowly and meticulously wading through each map. We as players tend not to actually do that because competing side objectives and recruiting everyone makes our brains happy. Even Conquest Lunatic can be pretty easily trivialized by reclassing Camilla to Maid and lowmanning nearly every map with her; Sceptistar has a run demonstrating that on her channel.
Even if you're not lowmanning, the gameplay loop of a lot of FE games does tend to devolve into calculating how many enemies a unit can take on an enemy phase, putting a good unit on a spot that fights as many of those enemies as they can handle (and ideally snipes something on player phase), ending turn, healing them up, and repeating the process. Even player phase focused games tend to fall into this pattern, they just happen to return "0-1 units" from that calculation instead of "2-5 units".
The difficulty of FE thus comes less from whether or not you can *beat* the game (unless you misplace your lord and your run suddenly ends), but whether or not you can beat it smoothly and/or stylishly (and have fun along the way, etc.). How many side objectives can you complete? How many funny builds can you assemble? Can you minimize deaths? Are you eschewing boss abuse and the Tower of Valni? In this way, I think Nuzlockes have similar secondary objectives, such as beating the game with a minimal number of deaths, holding off on using setup moves, and using low tiers.
I think the big difference is really just the number of decisions that can possibly be made and how they domino into subsequent turns. I don't necessarily disagree with your take but I personally avoid calcs for that reason.
The difference is that FE do not have a theorical randomness in your toolbox.
Unless you want to run 50 calcs, how are you knowing what you will use againist a boss if the entire premise of this game mode is that you use whatever team the RNG gods bestow upon you?
The obvious answer is that you are not using a random team, you are using a carefully crafted team by using every trick aviable to ignore one of the only 2 fundamental rules of a nuzlelocke.
It is like doing a no hit run but allowing mechanic that allow you to make certain hits "not count". While at the same time cranking up the difficukty because a regular no hit is too easy.
A lucky dodge in FE means so much more than a lucky dodge in Pokémon by leaps and bounds
Definitely agree with what you mention about how pokemon is just an objectively simpler and easier game than fire emblem, and that the mainline installments vary much more widely in terms of how their gameplay feels. And it's certainly true, anyone can beat any mainline pokemon game, no matter the restrictions you set on yourself. All of those clickbait "CAN YOU BEAT X POKEMON GAME WITH Y RESTRICTIONS" is obviously pretty trite and repetitive, and I agree that there will come a point when the well dries up and youtubers will have milked all the content they can get out of these games (unless pokemon releases a suitably innovative challenging game, lol yeah right)
But the answer to one of these pokemon challenge runs is almost never "no you cannot beat this it's objectively impossible" because that's not really even the question, the question is what fights become harder when these pokemon are what you have access to? Is the early game a brutal wall that sees a bunch of attempts fail? How much can X pokemon shine in this kind of run? That's the kind of thing people watch for, and yeah I do agree, it gets very, very repetitive, trust me I feel it's a waste of time to watch most of these videos myself when I already know the answer.
However, I do feel like it's a bit unfair to discredit any and all planning that goes into harder nuzlocke challenges of romhacks like run and bun or emerald kaizo just because that doesn't happen in the moment during the battle itself. I think that's just a difference of opinion honestly, I mean we know the people doing this planning are going to make an edited video on it anyway so why does it matter to you what they did to get there? You didn't have to sit there doing boring calcs figuring out the optimal play for hours, you watch an edited cut where the youtuber explains why the fight is so difficult, what the limitations are, why x pokemon is so threatening, and what they did to find a solution to get through that challenge
At the heart I understand what you're getting at, because I'm the sentimental sort myself and I much prefer the days when nuzlocke content was all about running through the game blind, picking up and using whatever trash the routes handed to you, affectionately naming them all, growing attached to them as you used them to fight, and mourning them when you lose them (probably to a critical hit or a mon packing self destruct, explosion or destiny bond you didn't remember). Nuzlockes as a whole I feel were in a better place when they were reserved for multipart letsplays and comics that sought to flesh out that attachment a permadeath run sparked, but really, there's nothing stopping you from going back and playing one of these games, or even one of these harder romhacks blind (drayano hacks though, definitely not ek or run and bun), you don't have to look up anything, you don't have to calc anything, you control the buttons you press, if it's not fun for YOU, you don't have to do it. I understand after biting a piece of the forbidden fruit it might be hard to try and pretend like you don't have that knowledge, but it's practically impossible to remember the ins and outs of one of these games completely unless you've ran it a million times.
Personally? I like the planning that can go into a tough fight to get the best outcome with the mons you have, I like plotting out encounters to take advantage of the routes available to me in order to up the chances of getting a very good mon, I like how even after calcs, a bad roll, or an unlucky miss, freeze, crit, etc. can force an even riskier play. It's personal preference, and it's fine for you to say you don't like it, and that the mass produced content about it is unappealing to you, but it's not like there's nothing to it. Good video overall, I've certainly felt the same feelings when it comes to nuzlocke content being better and more engaging in the old days and challenge runs of pokemon in general being a forgone conclusion, but I've sort've shed my apathy on that and taken a "live and let live" approach, and found things to enjoy about the newer style along the way. Sorry for the essay, TLDR: Projared's old fire red nuzlocke is still the best nuzlocke content on youtube
I get really bored of the modern style pokemon nuzlocke for exactly what you brought up, everything is calculated and it became all about the challenge and less about the pokemon, cuz to me, the original nuzlockes were more entertaining because it was people losing creatures they grew attached to because they made mistakes or got unlucky, it had even a slight bit of emotion, becoming a story of unlikely odds and the players flaws, and fit the series message of becoming attached to your team, hence why the nickname your pokemon rule existed, but now it's just trying to be strategy when the game isn't designed for strategy, where they just give joke nicknames and rig the game ahead of time to only get good encounters.
So, what you're saying is... we need a Pokémon Conquest sequel? It would be funny if that spinoff was part of the Pokemon to FE pipeline, and for many I'm sure it was, but it's still a very niche side game of a huge franchise that's very underappreciated
Agency mention 👀
On a serious note though, I do think the argument here is a bit reductive. I play both mons romhack nuzlockes and fe lunatic/maddening, and the things like planning a 100% line for a difficult fight are precisely what make nuzlocking fun. I can see why not everyone would find that fun, but it certainly can be. From a spectator perspective, watching someone execute their 100% line, especially when it makes use of some clever mechanic or niche item is entertaining because of the implicit understanding that it took a lot of knowledge/creativity to find that strategy. The "9 option" argument I think falls particularly flat for me, since the options/decision-making for any fight actually begin before the fight itself, in the selection of team members, moves, and items.
Just sharing a few thoughts. Great vid though. Was a fun watch.
i get what you're saying here but im pretty sure the point of the "9 option" thing was to show that, after all the calcs and shit all you're doing is your "line" not actually reacting on fly in any meaningful way to create tension because you already calced that in your planning stream a day ago. In fe, like I can't plan if my rutger just get's stat screwed so I'm forced to use roy to kill a boss because he's the only one who hit a threshold or if my tank crit five times in a row and got god levels. In pokemon everything goes basically exactly as planned and even most rng based things can be accounted for.
AGC represent
I remember having a lot of fun planning for the Team Star Revarooms, or the Blueberry E4. Figuring out the best way to get my win conditions onto the field, the best way to support them, figuring out which Pokemon could take out the opponent with the least to lose in exchange, how to deal with certain problematic Pokemon. It's really fun.
I think part of the problem honestly might be the UA-camrs being unimaginative with the content. Excelblem really is great, and as far as Pokemon goes I love Scott's Thoughts he's the only one I watch anymore since he embraces the data-driven approach to playing Pokemon and is basically trying to refine Pokemon speedruns with each individual mon to see where they rank. His videos are about his journey of coming to the optimal strat given the entire toolbox of a playthrough (learnset, TMs and their locations, levelups and rare candies, etc...). While a turn or battle in Pokemon rarely has anything interesting going on, speeding through all that and looking at the playthrough as a whole can certainly be interesting. It just takes the right sort of framing.
It's probably a bad idea in the first place to make a Pokemon video with the premise of "how hard is it to beat the game under X conditions?" You can do more with the games than that.
I love the use of Torterra, will forever hold the most special of places in my heart
Stunning video as always
The past 3 Fire Emblem games (excluding Echoes) have all been wildly different games with significant differences in gameplay. The most different the modern Pokemon games have gotten is Legends Arceus (havent actually played it) and fans seem to like it and thats probably why people are excited for Legends Z-A. The pokemon games have really only changed their core gameplay once (Attack and SP Attack split) while introducing random gimmicks like mega-evolution, dynamaxing, and terrastilization that effect 1 pokemon per team and often times simplify battles rather than complicate them. (not talking competitively) For example, I was recently playing Pokemon Shield and picked Cinderace. Cinderace was decent all game but towards the late game it was extremely easy to steamroll through if I just dynamax > fighting move x3 for buffs or x2 and 1 fire move for weather > sweep. This could be because of all the steel types but so long as I wasnt hitting something immune or resistant (I wiped on Leon's Aegislash once because I wasnt paying attention to see that it wasnt effected by fighting because it was ghost) I was able to just power through everything else.
Another facet is that you just tend to have more of a connection to the Fire Emblem characters because you use them like Pokemon but Pokemon dont talk and this can culminate in really tragic moments in FE runs where you or the streamer can mess up or randomly get crit and permanently lose a favorite character, having to hear their dying words can sometimes be icing on the cake too.
The problem with pokemon LA is ….. there’s no challenge here either! For a very long time all tamers you fight are using baby mons for far too long while you keep leveling up exponentially thanks to the open world nature. By the time you reach late game bosses you most likely have full army of level 80 each minimum.
Now maybe some can argue “play the main missions exclusively if you want a challenge” but this will bring us back to square one, this is a self imposed challenge.
@DarkJ1425 I feel like if Legends was challenging, it might buckle under the weight of it's flawed combat system. Plus the game is more focused on catching Pokemon than the battling.
Oh god, you made me imagine the nightmare of being stuck with 6 Roys in any given FE games
Also don’t recommend the hardcore Pokémon fanbase to switch over to the Fire Emblem fanbase, we are toxic enough as is
I would respectfully disagree that just because pokemon is “solved” while fire emblem is not, makes pokemon a worse series than fire emblem. Pokemon certainly is a much simpler game that is designed for young children in mind. Hardcore challenge runs were not in mind for the designers while making the games. They barely put enough time into making sure the games can be playable at this point. But fire emblem can be just as solved of a game with enough knowledge of mechanics. Because of how older fe games work (gba especially), there are ways to create a “perfect” run that can be duplicated identically. The rng in these older games is a lot less random than you’d think as it’s more of a set of pre determined numbers that can be skipped to create different outcomes.
Not to mention a lot of the choices in fe can be pretty uniform in their outcome. A character might have 30 movement options, but 8 of them puts you out of range of the enemy, 18 more might put you in range of an enemy, and then the last few let you make an attack on your turn if you want. There are certainly more options that lend to more unique situations, but fe can be boiled down to its core just as much as pokemon. It even has the same lizard brain mechanics it tries to feed you in most games. Pokemon has the type chart, fire emblem has the weapon triangle. The game wants you to use the element that’s strong against the enemy, even when it isn’t your best option statistically. It wants you to use a diverse team in your playthrough, even if having a full team of gyarados/wyvern riders statistically will beat the game the fastest.
I really don’t think pokemon is as solved as you think. It just feels repetitive and dull because of how bland pokemon is at it’s core. Fire emblem on the other hand feels better to play because the focus is on single player tactical combat instead of a monster collecting rpg, and has been appropriately polished in more ways. And it really shows with how fast pokemon pumps out games. Pokemon has released 9 major games and 4 dlcs on the switch while fe has had 2 games and 2 dlcs. Pokemon doesn’t want to and can never be as complex as fe simply because it’s not their focus
Pokémon's goal is to pump out low-budget $120 betas, then release cut content as more paid DLC to maximize profits as much as possible
Imported Cheese mentioned, how convenient!
Pass the tropium on the FE4 remake...
I think the statements made in the romhacking section pertaining to everything being optimized aren't entirely accurate. I'd disagree with the claim "There's no question of 'did I make the right choice'." It's very often that even the best nuzlockers don't come up with the best possible lines, and as such, there are many cases where a failure does prompt investigating other options. Additionally, there are few times where people map out every revelevant case; as such you get instances such as even Dekzeh in his winning attempt of Run & Bun (the romhack he created) steering during the E4 and having to win in unideal situations from a combination of not the best players in response to certain RNG cases. You can end up spending a few hours coming up with a "good enough" strategy for a boss fight, without having found the best or perhaps even any of the top 5 best lines.
I don't exactly disagree however that a lot of challenge run content doesn't stand out all too much for me. Usually unless the challenge run video uses a large string of very creative ideas that I haven't seen before, it ends up being a pretty replaceable experience that doesn't stick with me all too much after watching it.
I'm so glad that Monster Hunter Stories exists so I never have to think about Pokemon ever again. That being said, I should definitely play more Fire Emblem games, even if permadeath scares me.
I just started playing MHS recently and I am having a blast
Too bad there are only 2 games
The good thing is permadeath is optional, I love fire emblem and I like playing casual
As stated before, permadeath is optional, in some games at least, iirc every game post-Awakening has a Casual Mode where lost units come back before the next chapter.
@@mauricioalvarezpino1818 most old games had the perma deaths in mind, bloody Thracia 776 is a prime example of that. Also all GBA games since they are raining you with units.
Oh crap I remember the big one: Shadow Dragon on the DS, in that PoS you MUST kill your own units to get access to “gaiden” chapters. Otherwise you will never have a whiff of them. The God damn tutorial demands you to sacrifice a unit ffs.
Pokemon having only one difficulty AND unrestricted grinding and more battles just going through it normally than you really need doesn't help imo
Fellow ImportedCheese viewer, a man of culture I see
how convenient
Oh, a YTC Institute Intern!
I would be asleep right now but Cheese burned my bed
Tbh I think that pokemon gameplay videos as a whole has burnt out for me, as someone who still loves pokemon. I always see the appeal in franchises with a brilliant variety of monster designs like pokemon. I think the problem is that combined with the very consistently used mechanics across games, most pokemon content is gameplay-centric. It feels like gameplay is the only part of pokemon that matters, and this applies especially to competitive pokemon if I have to be honest. While I don’t actually think pokemon shines most from gameplay, but it shines most from creativity. Honestly main series games having the battle system of pokken tournament would be perfect, yeah it may not fit as well but it 100% would solve the problem.
As someone who absolutely loved scarlet and violet, the story being very influential to every second of pokemon would be perfect, and SV’s story imo is nearly perfect. At least on youtube, there’s practically no focus on content of pokemon’s stories, or characters in general. And even if there was, it’d always be the toughest to beat characters and because they’re tough to beat. I can get gameplay wise fire emblem having some things over pokemon but the variety and creativity aspect pokemon is king, in comparison to most if not all other franchises I’ve known about. I wish there was more focus on the content scale for that aspect of pokemon because that’s something that never was, never is, and never will be “solved”
Also I tend to have a strong disliking towards classifying something that _can_ be played or watched by all ages as “for kids”
That outro bit felt very derivative of Jimothy cool ngl man
Honestly FlygonHG has some good storytelling within his nuzlockes (still remember the spheal video lol), that's what keeps me coming back to his channel specifically for that type of content, since typical nuzlocke content has run a bit dry. If he does decide to branch out to new content in the future, I'd definitely stick around for it.
10:27 its funny you mention that, because my biggest gripe with pokemon has been how limited your interactions with pokemon actually are. not asking for the most in depth animations or whatever, thatd be unfair, but literally every pokemon is the exact same in terms of behavior. i'd love if natures actually had meaningful impact on some of the flavor text when interacting with your pokemon, or in battle. i'd love if it impacted how they behave around you, if theyre the type to burst out of their pokeball on their own for funsies like you see in the anime, or to bring back X and Y's pokemon amie system, where they have favorite spots they like to be pet at, and spots they hate being interacted with.
the issue with pokemon imo whenever they try and implement such features, is that they tend to make every aspect of it universal, and leaves any variety in reactions to the pokemon species themselves. they could add a million interaction options, but would sooner die than make it so you can get a pikachu that isnt smiling 99% of the time.
i dont know, i guess i just wanna see the pokemon i catch as my unique buddies, not some drone that perfectly represents its entire species
I always think I’m being too hard on pokémon and then I play something like Monster Sanctuary or MH:Stories that proves you can do something interesting with the formula 😭😭 nintendo it’s okay to experiment you’ll get your $60 either way I promise
Monster hunter stories just proved pokemon games are too lazy to experiment. Play yokai watch and MH stories it just blew how much qualities different compares to pokemon
The most they did to improve Pokemon's formula was ORAS. That was *10. YEARS. AGO.* and what did GameFreak decide to do? Downgrade the formula until it required basically no thought in every game afterwards. Pokemon has long been past its golden years legitimately a decade ago. So no, people aren't being too harsh on it. If anything, people are _still_ going out of their way to give it way more passes than it deserves. If a franchise like SMT, which came out a DECADE before Pokemon happened, can still innovate and improve, Pokemon has no excuses PERIOD.
As someone who fell off HARD for about 2 years and just returned to it recently, I try to maximize these games' strengths and the reason I love Pokémon so much: teambuilding with meaningful variety.
Like you said, from mom's house to the Hall of Fame is easy in every Pokémon game except maybe Emerald, Platinum and Ultra Sun & Moon. But I find the experience of placing goals and building your team towards these goals to be really satisfying. It's why I can stomach replays of S/V or love doing replays of Sw/Sh, even though I've been playing since gen 3 and do agree that map design peaked in the DS games.
What 'mons will you get? Which roles will you fill out? Do you know when you'll get every TM and move you want? Held items? These are often scattered throughout the game, which gives me a little dopamine boost every time I achieve these objectives and try them out in gyms. It's a deckbuilder's wet dream, a "card game" RPG that distributes "cards" throughout the game, so you can experiment with them.
But what REALLY ties these games together to me and why I dislike S/V is the Battle Tower/similar facilities. It's where I can FINALLY use legendaries and strong mons to meaningful effect, where teambuilding and raising choices matter the most, and introduces an addictive gameplay loop of obtaining BP and improving your team even more.
BDSP has serious competition for being one of the best in the franchise to me because of how they nailed this. Introducing mints, ability capsule/patch and Hyper Training, along with breeding improvements from Gen 6 and 7, the hidden ability fest of Gen 5 and the many mechanical changes (Fairy typing, etc) made things so much more streamlined while still taking effort.
However, it's of note that it becomes a 'guide game', meaning having Serebii or Bulbapedia open at all times to truly understand everything you're working for. Not only that, but the outside knowledge from places like Smogon and VGC is one of the main reasons I was actually able to do this.
Fire Emblem is a fantastic game series, and it captures many of Pokémon's strengths while being baked in actually good videogames, as a whole. I'm a huge fan of FE3, the GBA games, Fates (yes) and Engage. Engage in particular I love so much; ignoring its FF4 tier story, there's so much mechanical customization and the game itself feels fantastic to play.
But I don't feel like most FEs' mechanical depth matches Pokémon's - be it with self imposed challenges like Nuzlockes, the Battle Tower content or multiplayer (which I'm not really a fan of, having to pay and I kinda prefer going singleplayer in most games). There's just something about having the freedom to mold these creatures into roles and making each work within a team, minmaxxing every aspect of their being to be a better fighter that a weirdo like me just can't get enough of, when the game actually HAS a battle facility.
The problem, again, is that the games are so, SO easy. Very rarely do they hint towards this mechanical depth,, SPECIALLY nowadays. I think S/V DLC does it? But they did such a mediocre job with the base game that I don't really care for buying it. Pokémon buries its biggest strength ten feet under and barely makes an effort to invest people who are not already invested.
And a quick note about self imposed challenges: I think it's wonderful that Pokémon has a mechanical flexibility to allow for them, and even think that Nuzlockes are fantastic for making the player work with something they don't.
But I find the community's overreliance on them to be a bit weird. You CAN experience a Nuzlocke's mechanical variety and limitations without permanently killing your Pokémon, you just have to get out of your comfort zone and try out more stuff.
Having a Pokémon permanently unusable, to me, defeats the purpose of experimentation. Unlike Fire Emblem, it's never a part of the setting or expected in any way. It feels too drastic to suddenly lose a member that was maybe one of your strongest. FE always has had limitations in place to try to push you to victory even with Permadeath: lord dying being a Game Over, prepromotes, the Gotoh archetype..
A Pokémon nuzlocke has to rely on the variety of encounters to suppress your losses, so the snowball effect can be much, much harsher.
Anyway, I'll treat myself to the rest of the video. Your riffs on Pokétubers in the past were amazing, I couldn't stop laughing. Earned yourself a sub.
About calculating the chances for success, you're ignoring that Nuzlockes don't have everything guaranteed. Yes, some players map out encounters, but Pokémon is divided in two halves: teambuilding and battling.
If you don't engage with teambuilding decisions, making it as simple as possible, then yes: Pokémon becomes incredibly simple and boring.
The point of nuzlockes is to forcibly draw out the player's decision making through an artificial limiting of choice.
The problem with Pokémon having so vast a choice pool is that building challenges for a specific player level becomes harder than in other games. That's why limiting yourself through nuzlocke rulings help, you're much more locked than usual.
And frankly, you're making the nuzlockes seem much easier than they actually are. Yes, the more information you have the more you can prepare for it, but hardcore nuzlocke rulings make these games actually difficult. They are not as guaranteed as you're saying they are, people only succeed at them because of the available information and making the calcs.
Making calcs might seem like an exaggeration, but it's what these games boil down to. The worse your position, the more you'll need to prepare to compensate for it. How can you do so with such a limited ruleset? That's the point of nuzlocking
And lastly, yes, Fire Emblem dkes achieve this out of the box. But it is muuuch more predictable for the devs to balance it because there's less meaningful variety when compared to Pokémon.
I had a lot of fun replaying Pokemon S/V with a bunch of bug types (and Mimikyu) and learning that Leavanny can be quite the nasty sweeper with it's Fell Stinger, Charm and Sticky Webs. Mimikyu was an excellent Charm user thanks to it's Disguise.
Unfortunately the strategy was a bit *too* good, and the game became pretty easy once Leavanny got set-up.
@@miimiiandco That sounds cool! One of my biggest surprises in S/V was discovering how effectively Masquerain can sweep, with decently high special attack, Quiver Dance and a great movepool.
And exactly like you said, it feels like the games aren't prepared for us to make these discoveries. I'm usually content with building a strong team and tearing through the main campaign because Battle Facilities were guaranteed, and because the best options are usually unlocked later in most games (Masquerain's Quiver Dance is in the low 50s, Hydro Pumps, etc).
Thanks to S/V's open world and set level curve, I feel like it's even easier to make the game too easy. Most battles don't feel like they show off their Pokémon's potential all that well, it tends to be a stompfest until you arrive at somewhere you're underleveled.
That putting the pressure on part reminds me, I think it'd be really cool if in the next fire emblem they do something like a turn timer since I often find myself on my phone for like 20 minutes during player phase just cause theres no need to focus like in an action game.
And it wouldn't have to be some clock in the corner of the screen, maybe like its a boss power that only rarely shows up thoughout the game which you can see building up until he takes control from you to do an AOE attack, have an enemy phase thats just him(boring but reasonable), burn one of your turnwheel uses or if you're out just forcing all remaining units to wait( probably unfair but really cool)
Attaching a "speed-chess" style element to the game could be an interesting option or mode.
You could even have it play into the, now pretty standard, rewind mechanics. If you don't want/need to use it for redo's, you can use it to extend the timer or something.
I like the idea of a more soft or flavorful implementation like you mentioned, but I don't even think I'd mind a straight-up 'take to long, you forfeit your turn'.
It'd definitely change how people play the game. Hell depending on how familiar you are with the game, that could even make lower difficulties pretty hard.
Great video! I feel like you perfectly explained why I've been finding Pokemon challenge runs so stale these past couple of years. They can be tons of fun to watch for sure, but they're also so limiting. Fire Emblem Ironmans are way more varied by comparison.
One other aspect you may have missed is that, with exception to low IV's and adjustments with nature's, Pokemon stats are virtually the same with each run. Whereas with Fire Emblem the growth rates and who you choose to give stat boosters to can drastically alter a playthrough. I get a strength-screwed FE9 Boyd? Bench him and try using Brom as a dedicated axe fighter! Truly one Ironman run is not the same as another.
I still play Pokémon for the attachment.
Building a team of scrappy weirdos, and taking them to the top.
Hell, I even managed to make the fight against the rock guy from Shining Pearl engaging by pretty much playing wrong accidentally. (had to eek out a win by making him waste his pp)
What you're saying rings true though. Pokémon has been conquered.
Wonder if GF will manage to switch it up.
When I was a kid I would accidentally play monopokemon challenges because I can beat every game with whatever my favorite pokemon is at the time by spamming its non-ineffective attack moves.
I've tried 3 Nuzlockes in my life and I never lost any of them, but never completed any of them because I lost interest within the first 3 gyms. The constant near mandatory grinding of shitters was boring, and the need to "plan" every fight, lest you risk a random mon fainting and sending you back to the grind dungeon, is mentally exhausting and grinds the game to a halt. The appealing aspect of a Nuzlocke to me is supposed to be gaining a new appreciation for pokemon you neglected, but all the rules and restrictions you place on yourself just kind of places you in an environment where experimenting and having fun is just going to get you punished, so I'd rather just run a game casually with a new unconventional team on my own volition without the bloat.
When Soda brought up drama created my challenge runs I remembered my first playthrough of FE Engage when it first came out, I played classic and imposed a challenge on myself the if a unit dies, I must throw out all of the items in their inventory and if they have and emblem equipped, I would be unable to use that emblem till the next time the emblems were returned. And the drama that was created was Alear being my only unit left for like the last three levels because I'm not the best at fire emblem especially on my first playthrough
Battle Facilities and Pokémon Stadium are pretty hard though without external tools at least
I like to think there's a universe where Fire Emblem was Nintendo's biggest RPG and not Pokémon. It just makes so much sense given that both franchises have a lot of appeal, but Fire Emblem actually improved over time.
Imagine if FE was like Pokemon and every game was just FE1 with a new cast
The horror
@@SodaCrab Please I can only have so many nightmares at a time
@@SodaCrabThat sounds like a genuine fever dream that I don’t want.
I’m still waiting for that Pokémon fire emblem conquest crossover game
We'd have Marth and Tiki somehow show up in every game and in different forms *even more than now*
I’ve said this before but Pokemon challenge runs are essentially gambling. Your choices and options are so limited that you have to rely on RNG to win. There is no skill in beating a Kaizo Ironmon Nuzlocke because you’re just resetting the game until you get lucky enough to find a Pokemon with good base stats and get good damage and crits rolls.
All RPGs have that luck/gambling factor to them but in other games you don’t have to rely on RNG to win. In other RPGs your stats aren’t random. They give you characters with set base stats and say “You can play them as is or use these many different mechanics to create a unique version of the character no one else has ever made. You can even grind to max base stats if that’s what you want”.
Pokemon says “Here’s a character but their defense base stat is low. No matter what you do that mon is going to have permanently bad defense forever”.
If I play Dragon Quest or Shin Megami Tensei/Persona and my defense stat is too low the developers put in different ways to increase my defense stat. That I as a player have to discover on my own or ask for help from a friend or the internet. The RNG is minimized because the game gives you multiple solutions to having bad stats. Not just tough luck your defense is bad forever.
@Kyubee5136 people keep telling me to play fire emblem but maybe i should start
I eagerly await your kaizo ironman nuzlocke with no strategy, considering it takes no skill and all that.
@@seriousbacon3676 It really doesn’t. Kaizo Ironmon Nuzlocke is just pulling numbers out of a hat and hoping to win. All the strategies people have used to win have nothing to do with the skill of the player but the math and RNG presented by the game. Being skilled at Kaizo Ironmon Nuzlocke is like saying you’re skilled at BINGO or Roulette. Sure there are things you can do to help your chances of winning but the odds are so determinant on luck that what you do doesn’t matter. The player lacks agency and is at the whims of the RNG lottery.
When your options as that ludicrously limited in a ludicrously hard game, no wonder you have to resort to cheap tactics like that.
I will say that vanilla Pokemon basically never requires RNG to beat a challenge because of it's lax difficulty, unless you push the game to it's limits by doing a Magikarp only run or something.
Even if I did like Pokémon, whenever I see a video thumbnail of "I died several hundred times trying to beat this mod," I always wonder if this is even fun.
I started playing Thracia 776 recently (ironman). Got my first game over on 4x. I already know that I will be hyped to replay the game. I am in fact, keeping a notebook to assist my knowledge gap between now and next playthrough
Thracia gotta be the worst fire emblem game to play blind for the first time. It becames way more manageble when you know what you are doing and when reinforcements will suddenly appear
Pokemon videos: 😴
Thracia 776: 😫🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️
I have yet to meaningfully play any pre-gba fe games, i couldnt even get past the first chapter of genealogy 😂
I agree with you, and further, I find it frustrating that Pokemon acknowledges their aging fanbase, but still chooses not to implement any features for them. In fact, they tend towards removing features they like instead, like set mode. They choose not to be creative and come up with any new game modes or challenges. And worse it seems they've almost entirely dropped double battles and other such mechanics.
hmm while i generally agree with this take i will say that double battles are a poor example as the hardest challenge in the recent games was the s/v dlc bb league which consisted of only double battles
think kieran
Made for kids first play by adults last.
It's really weird how few double battles there are and how little emphasis is put on them, while doubles is also the official competitive format, and most balance decisions revolve around doubles.
the devs legitimately hate their fans
The funniest thing about pokemon being solved is that platinum was recently literally solved.
That mountain range comparison really hits the nail on the head. And that range grows impossibly wide once you get into rom hacks and fan games. As a fan game developer myself, it's hard to even express just how massive the variety is out there. If anyone reading this wants a reccomendation on where to start with this scene, I'd go with Vision Quest by pandam.
Funny you mention the Pokemon to Fire Emblem fan pipeline, because that's pretty much exactly what happened to me.
I still enjoy (old) Pokemon mostly because I like shiny hunting, but I enjoy Fire Emblem as a series far more.
Also Imported Cheese mentioned - that ironman was a blast to watch.
Even though i love Pokemon, even Scarlet and Violet because Scarlet and Violet have my favorite Story and characters in the series, its a really cool interesting take from a fire emblem fan.
26:35 sorry I can’t find that subscribe button. It disappeared forever and avoid.
You gotta watch Zoran, man's a wizard
I feel like Minecraft has the exact same problem to Pokemon in that the game isn't designed with challenge runs in mind.
Minecraft isn't made to put arbritrary rules in place to make beating the Dragon harder, it's made so that people can express their creativity by building pretty things.
Pokemon is the same. The games' difficulty is designed in such a way that any player can use any strategy they desire and have a fun time. Blasting through the game with Garchomp and Ogerpon is just as valid as using your favourites, or challenging yourself with weak Pokemon like Castform or Beedrill.
I tried using Leavanny, and I learnt that it's a really cool and unique Sticky Webs sweeper. With Charm support and Fell Stinger, it can really put in the work. My win condition shifted a lot towards setting up Leavanny to sweep, and it was fun using a sweeper like that - I haven't really tried it in Pokemon before. That was what was fun - learning a new strategy with a new Pokemon.
Can't wait for this video to somehow result in Three Houses discourse again.
You hit the nail on the head at 20:43
I think Pokémon is enjoyed for its familiarity but longtime fans would also enjoy if it was shaken up which hopefully legendsza does well.
I will say the video feels too long for how simple your point is, fire emblem is obviously more challenging but that isn’t necessarily the appeal of Pokémon. People who’ve stuck around with Pokémon enjoy it for its familiarity. I think it would be interesting if you showed how you personally changed from a Pokémon fan to a FE fan and what you have learned from playing FE
I played Pokemon blue when I was a wee little lad and absolutely loved it. I loved it so much that I started getting every game that came after it. It wasn't until Pokemon White that I came to the conclusion that they are all the same and there is no point in getting any future games.
Agency mentioned, video approved
Perfectly said what i agree, the current state of nuzlocking is a joke, prioritizing content over having fun, where every nuzlocke is preplanned, abusing rare candies and just made for X video.
Long gone are the days of just nuzlocking for fun
At first I disliked this video because it's just way too easy to point out the decreasing quality of a game constantly getting screwed over by it's publisher's release dates and stating the obvious that a strategy game is more complex, but your point shifting more towards the social aspect got me. People try way too hard to make themselves seem cool for only liking an easy jrpg with all the edgy jokes and challenge runs. I'm the end, that was a very good video with many solid arguments.
I've been saying this for a while now! I've actually done an entire essay on this in the past. Anyways, I completely agree. And it's for that reason that I think of Karen's quote when you beat her in HGSS:
"Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled Trainers should try to win with the Pokémon they love best.”
As you hoped to have illustrated in this exhaustively long essay, this is total bull at the absolute best case scenario. None of Pokémon is designed on a gameplay level from doing anything but using the strongest Pokémon in games that demand it difficulty-wise, yet it still thinks that those emotional attachments are core to the series’ ethos when the gameplay just objectively doesn’t reflect it in that sense. Which is jarring in contrast to Fire Emblem, which despite far higher difficulty, does back this up and does have its units be mutable in ways that Pokémon simply isn’t, and unless a fundamental overhaul happens for Pokémon, it likely won’t ever will be.
And for one more nail in the coffin, take the first game and consider Blue and Giovanni, the first being your rival who when you ultimately defeat him is told he doesn't love his Pokémon enough and that's why he lost, and the second being a crime boss. Sure, the aesop comes out on top since you're the one who won those fights, but these two people are the former Pokémon League Champion and the 8th Gym Leader, two of the most prestigious titles of the whole region. So friendship might be the best, but you can sure get far without it if you try.
It's disappointing, too, because I used to love Pokémon, but reasons entirely irrelevant to the point of this essay - namely, the dubious quality of the recent games - have made me fall out of love with the series. No matter how much you love your Pokémon, no matter how much I love Mightyena, I can’t use them in way that’s good if they’re that inherently awful, and if the game really is about emotional attachments, why rob that flexibility and balance? Just because Pokémon is objectively impossible to balance doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted.
Overall, it just makes me appreciate Fire Emblem more in a way that Pokémon doesn’t have; that flexibility. That ability to interact. That connection. The difference between Pokémon and Fire Emblem is overall a very fundamental one despite both being about love and attachments; Fire Emblem lets you break through those limits while Pokémon doesn’t. And if both series are all about those attachments, there’s simply no reason to waste time with Pokémon in that regard over Fire Emblem when one is simply far more intricate and well-thought in that message than the other ever will be.
Great video! Instant sub.
Karen's quote works out when you consider that EVERY pokemon is viable in the games they are a part of. You absolutely can, and should battle and win using your favorites. The fact that this isn't possible in online matches where there is a definitive meta is irrelevant to the actual games themselves. I don't think much more needs to be said. If you love Mightyena, it is entirely viable in every single game. If you leave it out to die against a Zacian using play rough, that's a fault of your own, as there is a reason why you have 6 team members. Intimidate is one of the best abilities in the game, and if you play after gen 5, then moxie is an option for sweeping as well. Give it Crunch, an elemental fang, taunt and swagger, and it will serve you well in any game you play. Would you be better off using other dark types? Maybe, but so what?
There was a nuzlocke I saw years ago of Pokemon firered. It was such a rollercoaster and one of the best yt series I’d ever seen. It’s too bad the human spirit of nuzlockes on youtube has been squeezed out by professional elitist challenge runners.
At this point, watching X challenge with Y rules aren't even about the difficulty or feasibility of the challenge anymore, except for extremely rare cases. It's about finding someone whose voice and vibe you gel with and can listen to as they act like a goof for 30m to 3h playing a video game in a way no one was meant to. This goes well beyond Pokemon and Fire Emblem.
You've put into words why I so strongly hated the Ironmon Kaizo nonsense from not too long ago.
BW2 feels the most like a JRPG of the Pokemon games. XP trends with your level vs the enemy's, you are rewarded for exploring optional areas, and while the game is easy it still tests your knowledge of the game's many mechanics. It gives you a lot of flavorful spins on the norm with the usage of double/triple/rotation battles (Painfully underutilized in modern games, even ORAS which is a remake for the games that LITERALLY INVENTED DOUBLES). The difficulty is not what the games are missing, it's the SPICE.
Nuzlockers are very comfy about the way Pokémon works. Complexity increases exponentially in a game where all the battles are in doubles format. However, you will hear nuzlockers complain about a difficult doubles experience because of the lack of certainty in a turn. Another example of Radical Red, which is considered to be a bad nuzlocke experience at the highest difficulty, but that isn't the remotely design intent.
I feel like you're a bit biased with pokemon to a extent, but one thing that pisses me off about main series that you didn't talk about is the fact that, since the AI is terrible at it's job, A LOT of the difficulty comes from the levels of the trainers and not their Pokemon or their strategies
If you grind a little you can easily just beat everything, when I decided to play more RPGs, even grinding didn't solve the problem of difficult fights, most of the time I actually needed to think for my strategy to actually work
Hey, recent subscriber crumb bum here! Gonna unveil a shocking revelation to you:
Most video games are DESIGNED TO BE BEATEN BY HUMANITY! Or solved, as you said.
And I don't mean to be sardonic towards you. It's something younger folk don't seem to quite understand. You spend a lot of time as a young gamer putting laurels in your wreath, maybe even cultivating some of your identity on being really good at video games.
Truth is, though, these games were solved already by the people who made them. Oh, sure, the devs might suck when playing them for real without godmode or whatever, but the truth is, outside of the aberrations(and many OLD arcade style games), games are designed to be beaten.
This doesn't mean our efforts are meaningless, but it does mean that when staying true to concept, it should be no surprise that games are beatable by SOMEONE.
Part of what actually makes Fire Emblem so appealing is that it has a perpetual gambling and brothel atmosphere built into it. Usually, to succeed with sub par units that you may(probably) feel attached to, you either need to spend a lot of time or a lot of risk with them. There's a butt ton of psychological mechanisms that take hold of people when they play Fire Emblem (Waifus Waifus Waifus).
Pokemon, on the other hand, as you alluded to countless times, puts you in the perspective of a child. Your main characters in every Pokemon are children. Your attachment only goes as far as the creatures' appeal does to you, and that appeal can fade. Unlike in Fire Emblem, where you can fantasize about your fantasy wife who also happens to be able to wield a lance the size of a Sycamore and kill 20 beefy men without breaking a sweat.
Without as many plays at psychology, Pokemon itself is less gripping than Fire Emblem. Without an appeal to maturity, Pokemon will forever sit where it's at, and it's executive board seems content with that. Of course, remember that even the first generations of Pokemon sold in the double digit millions, and you realize why that is.
There's no fixing what ain't broke.
Funny thing when pokemon did make a hard mode and they screwed it up in major way as enemy pokemon have higher levels but not stats (not counting pokemon only on hard mode) meaning you just level up faster than before with pokemon that same stats as there normal mode version.
Some Pokemon fans can be so weird sometimes. Fans raged when bdsp added an exp share because "it nuked the difficulty" without knowing the new exp formula more than compensated for it when in reality the game got easier because they got 15 years older. Then they raged that the elite 4 was too hard because the developers actually made a challenge.
Pokemon Unbound on its hardest difficulty as a hardcore nuzlocke. ❤ Harder than EK and R&B.
These were exactly my thoughts, only that I couldn't quite put them aloud
2:20 i hope you enjoyed the edits, that playthrough was an adventure to participate in. it was a very fun month but a lot of work
Cant enjoy pokemon anymore unless its a fangame with its own insane feature changes or competitive
I like the video, you make some good points, but I do want to say that challenge runs aren't the only content out there based on pokemon. as you mentioned there's a very active competitive scene which has no problems at all finding enough interesting and complex mechanics. the competitive scene us is also constantly changing, every gen has their own competitive scene even after all this time. and while I do agree that competitive pokemon is very reliant on outside tools, it is also still just as much reliant on the pokemon games. each generation brings new mechanics and interactions that shake up the competitive scene. But really there is another way of engaging with the games that I personally like. if you are a completionist there are few better franchises to play than pokemon. we have not yet reached the emerald kaizo peak in that sense simply because the peak is nearly infinitely high with things like shinies, ribbons, marks, high stats, etc. I do get why completionism is not interesting to some people, since the challenge comes from it not being difficult but from it taking a long time, but personally it has kept me interested in the franchise for a very long time.
I think using outside tools for competitive Pokemon is totally fair, since the game becomes a whole lot more interesting when you're playing against a human player that can make complex decisions and make predictions rather than a dumb AI that will always do the exact same thing. Calculating against a player is using a tool to help inform your decision, and they can do the exact same thing to you. Calculating against an AI just solves the fight for you
You mean to say Fire Emblem is more... Engaging?
My pokemon challenge run is just trying to use my favorites in competitive just to realize that Urshifu invalidates my Top 6's whole existence😢
It really do be like that sometimes
Subbed just for that subtle angecy reference
I do think the Mainline Shin megami tensei games are also a good place to look if your looking something more challenging than pokemon whilst still being a monster collection turn=based rpg
Jet the Hawk was seen at a Diddy party btw.
Wasn’t he also on _those_ flight logs too?
At this point, solo runs arent "Can X Pokemon beat X Region," they're "*what does it look like* when X pokemon beats X region"
... Now I want to see Robin solo FE7.
I agree with a lot of what was said here, and this is coming from someone who is an avid Pokemon challenge runner and Fates Conquest "major" as you put it. I'm by no means amazing at both but completing a Hardcore nuzlocke with No EVs and all the general rulings of any vanilla pokemon game is far easier than any lunatic conquest run that I've done. That being said at the end of the day I still enjoy these challenges even if pokemon is "solved." I don't generally use calcs or anything like that so my experience is likely better than others and I try to be less calculated with the decisions that I make, but all of these things are entirely induced by me and not the game or the rules that I'm using. With all of that being said, I still prefer conquest to any pokemon title.
Shout out to that one Pokemon-Fire Emblem fusion rom hack.
I am not gonna defend pokemon but this feel like the most bias take i ever seen...this week
Every Fire Emblem has been utterly deconstructed to the point that if you make the effort to investigate you can find the perfect way to beat each game in the most optimal way.
From the best characters, growths, most efficient weapons, the speed baseline to double, to hard mode bonuses, etc.
Most people that play Nuzlockes, do it with a basic planner app, not different than SMT fans playing with the fusion calculator or FE fans with huge sheetspreed of growths.
Is base pokemon easy?
Yes, and i an truly hoping for a flop so the pokemon company improve its games but to say that there is no player expression or challenge in a basic playthrough is false. Especially when the FE fandom, since the beggining, has had a META problem which make high level gameplay little variety.
What are irritates me the most about Pokémon is how they still refuse to do voice acting. They have said the reasons why but they are so blatantly bad. Even when fire emblem was on its deathbed, they still had the budget to do voice acting on the damn 3DS
The only thing Pokémon excel at compared to fire emblem is the community aspect surrounding their titles
Man, I love FE Engage
I don't like Nuzlockes at all and never have or will due to how they fundamentally go against game mechanics,. But I like challenge runs, not for the 'challenge' but just for doing something different. The entertainment factor isn't about 'can I do it' as much as 'how will I do it'. That being said, I don't care to see Pokemon be made harder and competitive does less than nothing for me in every way. I think if people try to approach Pokemon challenges as actual challenges and not just fun alt ways to play then that's a problem.
The only pokemon challenges I can watch are the single-mon 'time trials'; they *admit* that the games are piss-easy, and instead look at *how* easy a Pokemon can make the game in comparison to other Pokemon.
The lack of options also means that making Pokemon hard basically means "make it as unfair as possible". Difficulty hacks have to give enemies tons of options the player doesn't have access to, often meaning the first 1-3 gyms are the hardest part because the AI has 60 BP coverage while you have 40 BP STAB options at best. They also make the game not play like you played it as a kid. If I have to train a specific team for the second gym because it's only 'solvable' with a small subset of the options available at that point... and then have to do the same thing for the third gym... I'm not playing with *my* team of six.
I also think that Pokemon doesn't have enough randomness and enough 'backup' options. You *have* to optimize a sufficiently hard Pokemon game down to "as long as I don't get crit I'm good" because you don't have to option to take an action, then react to the results. In FE I can go for an 80% attack on an enemy that *has* to die this turn, and if it fails I can pour a second and third units turns into finishing him off. In Pokemon a miss or an enemy crit (which you can usually get to 0% in FE, but outside of a handful of abilities and one move can't turn off in Pokemon) creates a much 'sharper' swing. So you want to avoid those 80% die rolls as often as possible.
I don't even try for "hard" in Pokemon. I just want minor updates so that enemies feel about as challenging for adult me with knowledge of STAB and IV/EVs as the games did for 10yo me who knew the type chart.
Idk man, im pretty sure Zoran has solved fire emblem. Dude is on a incomprehensible level.
He's only solved Conquest. For now...
The popular romhack scene in general feels like a massive overcorrection from both mainline pokemon and early fan creations. Gone are the days of drayono, where you could make a challenging game which added content that benefited the game while still feeling authentic to the region the game is from. Now it's almost entirely about challenge and content, regardless of how well either of those things benefit pokemon. It'd be harder to name a rom hack that didn't add all pokemon 1-8 into a single region, and gave every gym leader 6 pokemon, than it would be to name one that did, and that is a shame. Interesting creations like emerald rogue and unbound just kind of get shafted in favor of overdone, flawed concepts, just because the main games don't do it.
I thought of Excelblem reading that title