Pokémon Scarlet & Violet - PLEASE TAG SPOILERS/LEAKS

[Tornado]

16 hours ago, DaBigJ said:

So essentially, Pokemon doesn't have to try anymore

They didn't have to try anyway. That's why they are four slightly iterative full price (x2) releases across half a decade and the most they have to show for it is a game that looks worse than exclusive titles in the PS2 generation.

[KHCast]

You know after the trainwreck that was the controversy around Stephs Sonic Frontiers review, I think this one will probably be seen a lot better. A lot of their points seem pretty relatable to most others experiences, and the overall score feels a lot more reasonable. 

 

 

 

[Blue Blood]

I just stopped paying attention to Sterling a long time ago. I got incredibly tired of their shit that became more about stirring up controversy and drama, often being negatively contrarian for no reason other than drawing attention. Scarlet and Violet are mediocre games at best, made infinitely worse by being rushed and buggy messes which Game Freak/Nintendo/TPC still have the audacity to split into two virtually identical versions. And to compound the issue, they're setting multiple sales records despite being the worst reviewed Pokémon games critically and by the wider audience. I could probably guess Sterling's review almost word-for-word, and I'd probably agree with it as per. But I'm guessing it's still still "triple Aaaaayyyy" this and "greedy corporations forcing crunch" that. I'm just so bloody tired of their spiel. It's less about the games, more about the politics. That's not the media I really want to consume. 

-

Anyway, my thoughts:

 

Game's absolute shit. The traditional Pokémon formula is stale AF now, and putting into an non-scaling open world with a linear intended progression system doesn't do it any favours. For all the problems that PLA had, that game brought so many new ideas to the table and I loved it. Battles were so lean in that game, and the strong/agile system coupled with with all the changes to status conditions and stat modifications made them so fresh. Catching Pokémon was a joy, held back only by a clunky UI. But SV ditches all that and goes back to being virtually identical to the system we had back on the Game Boy. Virtually everything that PLA reinvented or improved upon has been nixed here.

On an even more subjective note, God I really do not enjoy the artstyle at all. The new Pokémon designs are very round and soft, with lots of focus on the faces and gimmicky features, making so many of them feel like individual characters rather than Pokémon species.

Spoilers about new Pokémon:

Spoiler

I'm really disappointed to see yet more human-like starter evolutions, and especially another dark-type evolution for the cat. Litten becoming Incineroar disappointed me a ton back in SM, so I thought that there was no way Sprigatito would end up the same. At least I didn't pick Quaxly, I guess? That shit is an absolute abomination. Why do that starters have to be so themed like characters? Instead of a magician, a singer and a dancer, why couldn't the starters have just been more natural looking animal/monster creatures with elemental features? Since Gen 6 (arguably Gen 4/5 but to a much more subtle degree) the starter evolutions have all been very "themed" and I kind of hate it. They used to be done of the best in every generation, but I've not liked any of the final starters for a long time now. My final team in Scarlet before I gave up on it was Kilowattrel, Toedscrule, Clodsire, Cetoddle, Orthworm and Flamigo. I ditched Meowscarada shortly after it was fully evolved. I didn't want to use Flamigo either, but it was in my party since the beginning of the game and I couldn't find anything new to replace it with. Other Pokémon I tried but didn't end up liking were Lokix, Finizen, Wugtrio (actually didn't mind that), Rellor, Tinkatink, Charcadet and maybe more.  

The human cast all look totally uncanny too. What what's the obsession with the two-tone hair comes and the big fluffy designs almost all of the notable NPCs have? I know "anime hair", but the Pokémon games barely look anime anymore. And the artstyle is just so round and over detailed. Combined with the character proportions, enormous eyes and over saturated colour palette used across Pokémon, characters and the environment, the game is never nice to look at. It's plain ugly.

Gen 8 had some shockingly poor visuals and performance issues, but I at least thought that the overall art direction was solid enough. The game's could look rather nice under the right conditions (not BDSP). SV look bad under the most flattering of conditions, and that's before we get to talking about the performance. Low res textures, awful lighting, jagged edges everywhere, pop-in and low-quality actors with a short draw distance, camera clipping... We all know these games perform inexcusably bad. I've not run into many glitches personally, but I have had the game crash and close on 3 occasions.

I got 4 badges, all 5 Herba Mystica and 3 of the Team Star bases before I decided to call out quits on this game last night. I tried to play a bit more today and only found myself bored. I gave the game a fair shot. I was actually looking forward to it. It just ended up being crap due to terrible performance, bad game design and art that I personally didn't like. Even catching 3 totally random shinies less than 12 hours after starting the game wasn't enough to bolster my excitement.

Wake me up when Pokémon Legends Mew/Celebi/Zygarde/you-get-the-picture is announced. Legends should have laid the framework for the future the series. I hope it gets a sequel and continues as its own series, because after the downwards trend of Gen 6 to 8 and the car crash that is Gen 9, Legends is the only thing keeping my interest in this franchise alive. I still can't believe that that game turned out so well.

 

[KHCast]

53 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

and "greedy corporations forcing crunch" that. I'm just so bloody tired of their spiel. It's less about the games, more about the politics.

Not that much of that is actually in the review, but if it was, personally at least, I wouldn’t find an issue there? Imo when the “politics” start effecting the output, I think it’s relevant to the discussion of said product, especially to those that may want to avoid purchasing a product made by companies known to be abusive. 
 

Like I’d respect a critic reviewing a Ubisoft or Activision product willing to bring up the abuse still going on at those companies in their review over an outlet that “only covers games” and hypes up those companies products with barely a lick of coverage of the shit around them (cough!rabbidsmariocough!) . Cause doing the latter kicks the problems under the rug even more than they already are kicked, which further results in certain people continuously needing to bang that drum regarding that corruption to keep it from seeping into normalcy. You got your YongYea, Jason, and Stephanie, that blow the whistle on this stuff, but that’s really about it in the industry on the larger scale of things and as such it’s easily downplayed. Hate stephs actual reviews go ahead, there’s more than enough reason to on multiple points, (I do agree they sometimes feel as if they’re being contrarian) but I don’t think personally one of those reasons is their constant bringing up of shitty AAA practices that often get ignored/downplayed just about anywhere else 

 

I posted this in the other thread, but I’ll post it here too, as I do think it does a decent job at explaining stephs stance on this whole “being too negative” discussion 

 

53 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

Wake me up when Pokémon Legends Mew/Celebi/Zygarde/you-get-the-picture is announced. Legends should have laid the framework for the future the series. I hope it gets a sequel and continues as its own series, because after the downwards trend of Gen 6 to 8 and the car crash that is Gen 9, Legends is the only thing keeping my interest in this franchise alive. I still can't believe that that game turned out so well.

I’m still surprised and upset THAT game didn’t get any dlc/further updates. It’s not an original thing to say, but it’s one worth repeating: I’d have taken a decently sized dlc expansion for Arceus over Gen 9, there was so much potential there. 

[Blue Blood]

Sterling is just too much. Hearing the same thing over and over and over again has worn thin. It's hard to follow them anymore because I'm hearing less about the games and more about the issues surrounding them. I've heard those all before, made decisions because of them and now I just want to hear about the games in a vacuum. Sterling has become one of those creators who's content is so homogenous and devoid of varied and genuine opinions about the actual games that they cover that it's hard to listen to them anymore. All the political stuff is fighting a good cause, but fuck I just don't want to hear it. 

Anyway, back to the actual subject... Yeah, nobody was expecting the Gen 9 announcement when we got it. PLA was barely a month out the door, right? Considering the fact that PLA came out after the holiday season (losing that spot to BDSP), that it was a one-version game and had barely any multiplayer functionality, I think that it may well have been seen as a bit of a gamble. Not that it was ever going to be a failure, but it was the first time that Game Freak developed anything but a cookie-cutter Pokémon game, the first game without the social aspects/two me znd the first time what they actually innovated since the GB. As it stood in May, it had sold "only" 12 million units. In the same amount of time since launch, BDSP had topped 14 million units. BDSP was a safer bet, and I'd hazard a guess that it was also cheaper to make. And now SV has gone on to set all kinds of records less than a year later.

PLA was almost certainly an experiment. And I don't think it's certain that they'll be able to push forwards with it as a secondary series. I think it's likely that it'll get dropped in favour of the traditional model, or it'll adopt features like of the traditional model. Ideally though, they'd just make a straight sequel that's bigger and better, and has sizeable DLC. TPC is pumping out Pokémon games like never before, and even though the quality of those games is suffering, the commercial performance has never been better. 

[Kuzu]

As annoying it is to hear the same spiel over and over again, it is unfortunately a reality we have to deal with ever since the behind the scenes process of the game has been discovered.

Scarlet and Violet are riddled with problems...which are unfortunately the result of the politics involved in the process of making the game.

 

Masahiro Sakurai actually did touch upon the issue of game development in the current scene.

Its a short video but if you don't click it; the tldr version is that consumers don't give a damn about the development process, at all.

That sounds incredibly cruel and callous but its the truth. Nobody wants to hear about how developers almost died and lost sleep making the game, just if the game is good or bad.

 

So Pokemon as it is now, might be the result of horrific and terrible work conditions....nobody cares about that part though. What matters is that the games are bad, nothing more, nothing less.

 

The consumer-producer relationship is a complicated one.

[Salamander]

I'm also playing the game right now - quite slowly - and I honestly can't disagree with the criticisms above.  I'm not going to drop the game, I almost never drop games, but if I was a saner person then I might.  I go around clearing out each area, and finding all the little items strewn about makes brain go "ding" but am I actually enjoying it, or just satisfying an obsessive need to experience all content regardless of whether or not it's any fun?  It's a longer game, but is it actually any better or more interesting for it?

It's a vast world, alright, but the expansion of the world in Pokemon games seems to have come with a reduction of the things you actually do in it.  Lapsed fans are sometimes accused of having "outgrown the series", but it seems clear to me that what I want hasn't changed, it's the games which have changed.  What I always enjoyed about the games was fundamentally that they were RPGs, with dungeons and puzzles, and those are the elements which have been pared down in favour of, fundamentally, more walking.  Towns are bigger than ever, but they contain less than ever, just piles of outside-only buildings and sandwich shops and fashion stores split among half a dozen interfaces so you have to scrub around to find anything you want.  Towns in the 2D games were tiny, but had by far more buildings you could actually enter!  And while I've only done two gyms so far, the "gym tests" so far are unutterably inane, asking me to go somewhere I would have gone anyway and participate in some dialogue, or to physics around a giant olive (for a Bug-type gym!).  The vast-space model has also finally broken the gameplay device of the enemy trainer; previously used as barriers and tests, they now lie stranded, a speck of dust among a desert, and have to be spoken to in order to initiate a battle no more interesting than the surrounding masses of wild battles.  I didn't play Legends, but I think perhaps I understand why that game apparently had so few trainer battles in it.

I do like the new Pokemon so far, and it's nice to see that there appear to actually be a respectable number of them.  Speaking as somebody whose only interest in a Pokemon game is the new ones, then the increasingly enormous quantities of old ones they've been shoving into the regional dex are just filler, as far as I'm concerned.  I enjoy that there's an active effort to adapt previously unvisited animals or other species or concepts hitherto-unseen, and that's most of what matters to me; maybe I have fairly undiscriminating tastes when it comes to Pokemon design, but it's really only Gen. V which I think had an above average number of genuinely ugly designs.  I do, though, think the more realistic character design and texturing is not a success.  The human characters, I think, are by and large not pleasant to look at.  The 2D art is largely fine, but once realised in 3D then I think the designs are growing less appealing in proportion to how much more realistic they are supposed to look.  I really think a more abstract style would probably help here; cel-shading, is that what it's called?  Something with more emphasis on clean blocks of colour.  The game would probably run a lot better for it, too.

SwSh was the point at which the scales fell from my eyes as regards Pokemon and it became clear to me that the jump to 3D had resulted in clear content production problems for Pokemon.  And while Scar/Vi appear to have a lot of "content", it's undifferentiated and I don't regard the interaction with it as meaningful.  I hope I can stop myself from buying the next games.  I enjoy finding and raising new Pokemon, but I no longer enjoy the context in which that takes place.

Shin Megami Tensei V was also an attempt to do nearly everything Scar/Vi are doing, minus non-linearity (and even then its areas are very open!), and frankly I think it was more successful in almost every respect.

[DarkRula]

There's definitely a good concept here, but it is so half-measured. An open world that was marketed as being free to do what you want instead has quite a few roadblocks in how you can progress. As I said in my review of it, it's pretty much a game with a linear story that allows you to freely choose a chapter to play. That's not freedom. And aside from those three main stories, there's nothing else here. It's open world alright, and there's great exploration to be had, but everything else but the story feels weak.

It would have been a lot better to have side stories in the game that are how you battle other trainers, 'cus as they are they're pretty pointless. There's very little in the way of anything beyond those main stories, with nothing even in the towns worth enjoying beyond the shops (and they're kinda pointless when the main part of customisation is locked to four similar-looking uniforms). The concept is there, but Game Freak are at breaking point, which just doesn't allow the games to go beyond feeling like a concept. To shine as so many want them to.

It stings even more having recently completed Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and seeing just how much side content that game had.

[DaBigJ]

https://dotesports.com/pokemon/news/nintendo-support-reportedly-no-complaints-pokemon-scarlet-violet-performance

Have I mentioned how much I ℱ𝓤𝓒𝓚𝓘𝓝𝓖 hate Pokemon? Yes I know it IS getting a patch, but it's gonna take weeks.

[Soniman]

Did everything required to reach the credits. I like it, it’s a shame this game was probably developed alongside Arceus so they probably didn’t have time to implement the QOL changes that people really liked, because if SV had that (alongside everything else regarding its unacceptable technical issues) this could’ve been really special. It’s weird because this is definitely the most I’ve enjoyed a Pokémon game since Sun and Moon but it being the lowest reviewed mainline Pokémon game is completely deserved, it NEEDS to be because this game sold like crazy and Game Freak need SOME sort of wake-up call for how badly this is fucking yo the brand name. 
 

I like just wandering around, catching Pokémon, moving at my own pace, I like that it sometimes takes a long time to go from city to city, like it’s a actual adventure in the world of Pokémon, im someone who always completes the Pokédex so im constantly capturing any new Pokémon I see so im much slower than most, took me about 25-30 hours to complete everything.

I do like the main plots but to know it’s actually still all basically linear and there’s zero level scaling of any kind is such a bummer. I was over leveled a few times because of it, so ironically the experience would’ve been better if it WAS blatantly linear and simply told me where to go instead of pretending it isn’t and having me play guessing games on where to go next instead.

Difficulty is still a joke overall though, I think only one Star Base captain gave me trouble, and the Champion??? What a fucking joke, worst Champion fight in the series, finally toping Diantha

But uh yeah I like the story and characters also, pretty solid after SWSH, the climax in particular was really interesting and very, not Pokémon in a good way. 
 

Maybe I just have low expectations at this point but I was able to look past how ugly and terribly performing the game is to enjoy what they offered, I literally spent hours in one area because I wanted to see all the Pokémon it’s that fun for me, it’s a complicated feeling, feeling that this franchise is getting worse and worse in many areas but better than others with each installment.

 

[DarkRula]

I just said to the game "you want me to find my own treasure? Fine. I won't follow any of the stories" and forged my own path around the region. I might have been pushing into the 60s so over levelled for pretty much everything south of the mountain, but at least it allowed me to do what was advertised and do things how I wanted. And even then, I still appreciated that Nemona was testing us throughout by level-capping herself. That she was pushing us to be on her true level having seen potential in us.

[Blue Blood]

8 hours ago, Soniman said:

I like just wandering around, catching Pokémon, moving at my own pace, I like that it sometimes takes a long time to go from city to city, like it’s a actual adventure in the world of Pokémon, im someone who always completes the Pokédex so im constantly capturing any new Pokémon I see so im much slower than most, took me about 25-39 hours to complete everything.

It's interesting how we can play the same game and take away opposite things from the same experience. 

The sense of adventure is something that's been sorely missing from Pokémon for a very long time. Somewhere between Gens 5 and 6, the adventuring stopped and was replaced with a guided tour of whatever region each game was set in. I honestly found nothing to enjoy regarding the gameplay when it came to travelling across Alola and Galar.

Paldea is different, except its not. The open nature of the place means that the hamd-holding and regular interruptions stop once you've finally finished the lengthy tutorial, which is a marked improvement. But the games literally mark every single destination on your map by the end of the tutorial. There's nothing to change the pace like blocked paths or oceans to cross, no routes memorable layouts and secrets to find and virtually no dungeons (those that do exist just feel like extensions of the main path anyway). The open world is incredibly plain. Navigating the terrain was nothing but a slog because it was just entirely uninteresting throughout. And then when you finally reach one of your destinations after what feels like forever, you get slung right back to excessively long text dumps of recent generations. 

The gameplay loop of Pokémon SV just isn't there. It fumbles at every step. I just cannot go back to the slow traditional battle system after PLA gave us a new system that refreshed everything and  trimmed the gay further. Everything you seem to find engaging  just had me bored. 

[Kuzu]

something something "rough transition to 3D" 

 

I'm starting to feel like that I really do have some form of Stockholm Syndrome for this series, because even at it's worse I can't really be too hard on it. I've played better games and these absolutely run like shit, the graphics are bland, the story isn't anything to write home about, and some character designs are hit or miss. 

And yet...I can't put it down. It's a really shitty feeling when I know and understand these games can and should do better, but I'm still enjoying them all the same. Maybe it's because I'm a bit more interested in the competitive and battling aspect, so this stuff is kind of secondary, but still. The fortunate part is that I can just play Pokemon Showdown for the competitive stuff 

This Mightykeef short just hits harder...

 

[DarkRula]

For me, I think I've just become used to jank from poorly optimised games. Miraculous, Delivery Driver, Truck and Logistics Simulator... The list of them goes on. I can't help it, but I can recognise their jank while enjoying what they offer. Except Delivery Driver. That one has no redeeming factors about it.

[Sonicka]

Yeah, this continues to be a weird one.

It's like I can see all the technical issues... but it just doesn't matter to me. There is still enough visual eye candy and the magic of Pokemon roaming around being all cute and weird to feel like I'm finally running around the anime just like I used to dream about, it's almost perfect were it not for the game chugging along at times.

I mean, obviously I would have preferred this to visually look on the level of New Pokemon Snap or something, but it does the job and exploring the topography of world has been a fun and engaging experience so far. I just like wondering around and there are enough points of interest, collectables, landmarks (and of course, Pokemon) to keep me enthused through this. 

There's just something quite mesmerising about it all to me, even the little things like the stupid signs pointing the way to Artazon had me chuckling. 
 

20 hours ago, Blue Blood said:

I just cannot go back to the slow traditional battle system after PLA gave us a new system that refreshed everything...

I'm in two minds on this one, I don't really think that the Agility/Strength style really added very much to the system overall that regular attacks can't achieve given the right move set. It was probably the part of the game I forgot about the most when playing Legends.

However, I do miss being able to throw a pokeball to catch a weaker Pokemon without battling, or physically controlling the trainer when in a battle, or being able to actively run away whenever you wanted - these sort of QOL features were nice elements that added to the freedom of the battle experience, freedom which Sc/Vi is supposed to promote but doesn't when it comes to it's traditional battle system. I don't hate it, but Arceus did do some things better here. 

That being said, I do like that Pokemon can tell you which new moves they'd personally like to learn rather than you choose, and they also kept the forget/remember move system over from Arceus in case you want to change your Pokemon's moves later or made a mistake. Nothing is lost forever and choice is always available, I like that.  

[Blue Blood]

1 hour ago, Sonicka said:

I'm in two minds on this one, I don't really think that the Agility/Strength style really added very much to the system overall that regular attacks can't achieve given the right move set. It was probably the part of the game I forgot about the most when playing Legends.

However, I do miss being able to throw a pokeball to catch a weaker Pokemon without battling, or physically controlling the trainer when in a battle, or being able to actively run away whenever you wanted - these sort of QOL features were nice elements that added to the freedom of the battle experience, freedom which Sc/Vi is supposed to promote but doesn't when it comes to it's traditional battle system. I don't hate it, but Arceus did do some things better here. 

The agile/strong style wasn't revolutionary by any means, but it was appreciated because it sufficiently changed the battle system by adding an extra layer of depth, whilst also not changing the fundamentals or tacking on an wholly optional 1-time gimmick like Megas, Zs, Dynamax or Teras. It was a good addition. 

That's not even my main point though. Battles in PLA were so much faster. For example animations were considerably shorter, whilst text boxes about status conditional, stat changes and weather were streamlined as much as possible. Battles in SV feel like going back in time. Even if they didn't want to include PLAs actually mechanic changes such as the attack styles, different weather and status effects etc, there's no reason why SV had to repeal all of the battling QOL improvements too.

[Sonicka]

All things considered I also think it would be interesting to see a shift to a more active turn based battle system with Pokemon in the overworld. Something that's always nagged at me is that you're surprised by Pokemon in the tall grass... but they wait for you to make the first move a lot of the time. I think wild Pokemon should be going all out at you if they instigate a fight or you start one with them - PLA came quite close to this idea... except for it being the trainer itself that was pursued and attacked actively instead of the Pokemon themselves. 

The only time ATB shouldn't be appropriate would be battling other people since this is when Pokemon would be taking commands off their trainers.

I suppose there is a sort of halfway point with the Let's Go Mechanic... and at least in Sc/Vi the Tera raid battles are speedy in comparison to Dynamax raids - this feels somewhat closer to what I mean for speeding up some processes, and I say this as someone that loved doing the Max Lair stuff in the Crown Tundra expansion... but boy, even I recognised what a slog that could be.

[Sega DogTagz]

https://www.ign.com/articles/pokemon-scarlet-violet-battle-stadium-bug

 

 

So this is happening. The game is running the same RNG coding for every single battle which means its possible to game the system and learn the pattern to ensure 1HKO moves always hit. It also means the same in reverse, as there are other situations where 90% accurate moves will always miss.

 

Which throws quite a monkey wrench into ranked battles.

 

Ugh.

 

 

At the very least, this should be an easy fix that GameFreak should not be able to ignore. They will have to address this (sooner rather than later to boot) which might get the ball rolling on some other patchwork that this game seriously needs. On the downside, this would be a gameplay critical patch, so it may take priority over anything that addresses the games stability or quality of life....

 

[Salamander]

Personally, I've never really minded the shift to per-game gimmicks.  I think by Gen V it was pretty plain that the designers were struggling to come up with new ways of deepening or refining the battle system as it stood, which was why they were messing with things like Triple Battles and Rotation Battles, which were cumbersome and didn't really bring anything new to the table; and subsequently, in XY, Sky Battles, Horde Battles, and Inverse Battles.  The only niche I'd say they're really failing to tap are Double Battles; it's crazy that it's the official competitive format and yet the games barely use them (I've encountered maybe one in Scarlet?), even whilst continuing to introduce new mechanics for them.  They should really just do a game focussing on doubles: They could open by giving you a starter and then a weak legendary by analogy to Cosmog and Koraidon and the Zygarde Cells, something that'll get stronger and more significant over the course of the game - and they could even throw in a gimmick by having once-per-battle fusion attacks or something.

[DarkRula]

A game that focuses on double battles...

I'm not going the- I've already lost. Give us a remake of the Gamecube games and make a third one! Or a different side series that keeps the same idea of double battles being the core focus!

[Celestia]

In general there's a lot of depth to the battle system that isn't really utilized in the games campaigns, but double battles are absolutely the most baffling thing to neglect, hell as far as I've seen they've become even rarer somehow. I'm kind of hoping that if we get a follow up to PLA (which hopefully will happen, but I get the feeling it won't lol) they consider doing it there, since like ColoXD I think spin offs would be a good excuse to do it.

 

I don't even have a Nintendo Switch let alone the game so I can't comment on it much. Uh. The music is great. I hope they fix the big problems. Carry on.

[Blue Blood]

20 hours ago, Salamander said:

Personally, I've never really minded the shift to per-game gimmicks.  I think by Gen V it was pretty plain that the designers were struggling to come up with new ways of deepening or refining the battle system as it stood, which was why they were messing with things like Triple Battles and Rotation Battles, which were cumbersome and didn't really bring anything new to the table; and subsequently, in XY, Sky Battles, Horde Battles, and Inverse Battles.  The only niche I'd say they're really failing to tap are Double Battles; it's crazy that it's the official competitive format and yet the games barely use them (I've encountered maybe one in Scarlet?), even whilst continuing to introduce new mechanics for them.  They should really just do a game focussing on doubles: They could open by giving you a starter and then a weak legendary by analogy to Cosmog and Koraidon and the Zygarde Cells, something that'll get stronger and more significant over the course of the game - and they could even throw in a gimmick by having once-per-battle fusion attacks or something.

The reason that I dislike the gimmicks from Mega onwards is that they're practically all the same: watch a flash animation of your Pokémon glowing for a few seconds, and then the battle becomes several times easier. Maybe that's not how it works in the competitive scene, but in the single player game that's all that any of the gimmicks do. 

Lots of Pokémon, moves and abilities to completely unused in single player. And don't get me started on the items. Rarely do gyms and other significant encounters actually take into consideration a multitude of the mechanics available. They could greatly freshen up the experience by utilising some of these things without making it complicated or too difficult. Nobody wants it to be a case where any standard battle is so difficult that you need a full understanding of the millions of ability, move and type combinations to succeed. Or where your party choices are restricted by whats practical. Just something that breaks the monotony between games. 

As it stands, the games will basically just do this to differentiate battles: type specialisms, legendaries are strong, sometimes they use the gimmick so that you have to use it too. Double battle are just the beginning when it comes to variation. 

[Salamander]

All fair comments, though it strikes me on reflection that the real reason why it's difficult to leverage the full range of options in Pokemon battles - or, for that matter, to have the gimmicks be anything more than a flash animation, then easier - is that most Pokemon battles simply do not last very long.  And that's true even if you're not, as I am, maybe halfway through the game and already overlevelled for basically all the remaining content.  I suddenly understand why the fangames have level caps and overdesigned puzzle bosses...

[Blue Blood]

That's a simple one. Make the major battles (rival encounters, gym leaders, Team Whatever bosses) last longer. This is something that GF have been actively going against for the last few Gens, with hardly any of the major encounters having more than 4 Pokémon, and often even less. 

No need to change much about the basic trainer and mook encounters though. They would certainly get tiring pretty damn fast. A lot of this comes down to just how aggressively easy Pokémon games are. Not that they were ever difficult in the past and nor should they really be, but a touch a creative challenge that doesn't bump up the difficulty too much would be really nice (there's a reason why people want the incredibly barebones challenge mode from BW2 to return). Especially because the games could easily prime you for the challenges ahead. That's what the regular battles should all be about. 

[Salamander]

3 hours ago, Blue Blood said:

No need to change much about the basic trainer and mook encounters though. They would certainly get tiring pretty damn fast.

Maybe.  One of the things I've been thinking about as I play the game is that regular trainers are so few and far between, and more aggressively optional than ever, that they really feel irrelevant - but being an actual challenge would alleviate that.  When the vast majority of your battles are going to be against wild Pokemon, the game's actual boss fights feel a lot more significant... but not if they aren't actually any harder, either.

I don't seriously expect the games to get much harder without a serious change of design philosophy at the top, though, as the series seems to have well and truly pivoted to being aimed primarily at newcomers.  Challenge is relegated to multiplayer, which I have no interest in; and the production pipeline is clearly so tight that adding features like difficulty levels is out of the question.  I don't necessarily mind an easy game, but the rest of the game should ideally be a bit more engaging to make up for it, rather than being at least 50% too large for what content it does have.

I've found it hard to give up on the series simply because recent entries have still managed to convey a distinct sense of individuality which makes it difficult to easily compare them to past entries, though; so I still get curious.  The writing is at least mildly more interesting in some areas this entry, though, and I've heard that the endgame sequence is pretty out there, so that's something to look forward to once I finally wade my way through to it.