Great interpretation of first gen Pokémon. I still believe that the first gen greatly would’ve profited of more Pokémon having top tier viability by giving fighting a non useless move, bug types non trash bst, ghost a damaging move and special typing and a rock monotype for flavor.
I agree. This is one of the reasons I love modding it, which I'll talk more about soon. I see so much potential and possibility in what path those games were walking down.
Love this vid! As a fan of gen 1-3 in particular, and as a game dev working on a combat based platformer, i love how you talk about things most other ppl rarely talk about, or brush under a rug, and bring up their merits. Theres a lot of asymmetrical balance that makes gen 1-3 special to me that the series lost over time. Id love to hear more about your combat system as time progresses. Keep up the good work!
Hey Howard. Nice video. Started with gen 4 myself, so I can't relate directly to the unique drama of gen 1. I think what happened is that Pokemon started as a JRPG, but quickly became its own thing. I can hardly imagine how gen 1's design philosophy could carry a never-ending franchise. On top of that, I'm not sure how much of gen 1's design choices were deliberate and how much it was improvised and based on intuition. So in subsequent games, when they put more "thought" into it, drama wasn't taken into account.
Very true, a lot of it is that. You can actually straight up see how different designers/devs kind of poured different philosophies, aesthetics, and whims into it if you look through the context in which it was made, and it all formed this specific result due to the way it was wrangled together (+ other factors like restrictions). Afterward, Pokemon was reflected upon as "Pokemon." It's insanely interesting looking back, now with my perspective from making stuff myself and having that higher relatability. It's really practical too if you can identify who was thinking what on the project because it solidifies your understanding of what goes into producing that specific final product. Really helps you understand what you want to be thinking about when developing yourself if you want your product to go in one direction vs another. Honestly, could talk endlessly about this topic (design intent stuff with games), so I'll be organizing my thoughts for then.
I quite enjoyed the video but feel like it the for the most part avoided the elephant in the room that is ice beam, blizzard, and the freeze status. Mainly with tanky pokemon like Chansey or Lapras able to just sit there and spam it out, deal solid damage, and have a solid chance to outright get a kill with no counterplay to that. A mechanic so unhealthy for the game that it pushes the fire type entirely out of the meta just cause it can unthaw a frozen pokemon. You'll even have some trainers go out of their way to swap pokemon into negative status effects just to make sure they can't get one shot.
I was considering having a bit on freeze in the video, but it didn't have an elegant enough spot for it. When I do my video like this focused on Chancey, I'll talk all about it and my extensive thoughts on it and all the ways I'm going to implement statuses differently, so look forward to that.
While I don't necessarily think that Gen 1 was the peak, I do vastly prefer the first three generations to how Pokémon progressed onward. And a lot of that is due to the more grounded, classic RPG philosophy established in Gen 1. Movepools got too wide, the types lost a lot of their texture due to how powerful everything has to be. Grass had less direct power, but a lot of utility, Steel attacks increased the user's stats, but aren't the best within themselves, Steel being a more defensive type by nature. Fire/Electric/Ice lead an elemental triangle, all with their own status, and powerful special attacks. Bug had an emphasis on multiple attacks, Fighting attacks dealt heavy damage, but were often situational (Counter, Cross-Chop, Submission, Hi-Jump Kick, Focus Punch). Ghost is immune to normal/fighting which is a massive advantage, but isn't really much of an attacking type, Gengar was still powerful without STAB. Moves like X-Scissor, Scald, Close Combat and Special Shadow Ball ironically diluted Pokémon's mechanical personality by adding too much convenience, which is a common problem that even outside of combat, the series has suffered from.
I'd say close combat still fits as it does weaken you each time, so it fits thematically, and you can't just spam it. but yes I get your point, and as much as I love the simplicity of the 80 power 100% hit rate moves, it does really harm the theming of the types, as its then just a palette swap. so I am rather curious to see more of this, and hope to see more of that angle of the types.
Love this. I personally believe there are no bad mechanics, just bad implementation of mechanics, and also 'jank' is an important part of any media that helps make games good and the supposed 'flaws' a game may have help elevate them from being cookie cutter flat broad appeal products with the interesting points sanded down to smoothness (like many modern mainstream games and films). Looking forward to seeing this game of yours!
seriously, this is one of the BEST game balancing videos that i've ever seen in my life, this video opened my mind A LOT, and i'm also a game dev, thank you my friend :)))
I must admit these character designs look incredibly cute and marketable. Love how you show these girls off from side profiles. Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth and Hacker's Memory has the INT stat. It effectively works the same as RBY Special. That mechanic is no longer unique to Pokemon as far as monster collector JRPGs go. As a game developer, programmer and one whom has played a wide variety of games myself, I am inclined to think game balance can very easily be defined by effort vs reward. In a casual platformer, you need to go through the effort to be good at timing and aiming jumps to get rewarded with progression. This same principle can apply to Pokemon. In a casual playthrough, they do not just GIVE you Mewtwo at the start of the game. They intentionally made it so you gotta go through the effort of the story and Champion to get him. The same applies to the competitive format because there is very little effort to using Mewtwo to getting rewarded with steamrolling over most matchups and makes everything around much less interesting. Frankly, Pokemon's hazard system is laughably terrible and unbalanced. Yo-Kai Watch 3 has a hazard system with monumentally better game design behind it. That game's battle system has far more "drama" because of how board placement works. You can walk AROUND the hazards and they only last for a few turns as opposed to Pokemon forcing you to put up with them and are permanent until cleared. Again, effort vs reward. Ya click Stealth Rock ONCE for effort and the reward is the opponent has all their Rock weak monsters at risk. Yo-Kai Watch 3 also allows for far more specialization to make each monster unique while Pokemon even back in RBY had massive overlap issues. That game also has Yo-Kai like Whisper and Pandle where crits are a mechanic that have far more control and more drawbacks. It's more intuitive that way. They boost crit on themselves or allies but are also at risk of taking more crits. Effort of teambuilding to boost crit and reward of greater crit rates. Yo-Kai Watch 3 also has debuffs that can make monsters just randomly miss their turns. Clearing out any debuff in that game is a skill issue. Effort of clearing the debuff and reward of being less a victim of offensive pressure.
Thanks for the complement! Appreciate it a lot, character designs are a big point of stress for me. That's a good way of thinking about game design for sure, it's an area I have a lot of strong ideas about so I'll be sure to talk about things from that perspective in the future. You've inspired me to look at Yo-kai watch. It's a series I've just never had any meaningful contact with. I'm gonna check out your content, thanks again!
I always really liked how crits were tied to Speed. As for why: if your ATK is 1 or 100 higher than your opponent makes a big difference, if your DEF is 1 or 100 higher than your opponent makes a big difference, but if your Speed is 1 or 100 higher? 0 difference, nothing at all, just a bunch of wasted points. Though rather than going by base Speed, it should of course go by actual Speed. Of course, crit rates were way too high for high-Speed Pokemon (especially with taking high-crit moves to 100%), but there's a very interesting theory about the Focus Energy bug: supposedly, crit rates are swapped altogether. Focus Energy crit rate is supposed to be the normal crit rate, while the normal crit rate is supposed to be the Focus Energy crit rate. And that theory seems to check out: depending on the Pokemon's Speed you get to values that are quite similar to gen 2+ values.
Big agree. That's wild also, because when they made Stadium they reworked crit rates to make them a little more reasonable (bit lower for fast pokemon, bit higher for slow pokemon iirc) and fixed focus energy. So they devs on Stadium just embraced what they ended up with before Gen 2 gave us the crit philosophy we have now. I didn't get into in this vid, but the speed system I'm making is going to differ from Pokemon's in a number of ways, and one of those will involve trying to fix the way in which speed points are wasted in that way (although not through determining default crit rate ofc).
@_Vengeance_ speed is the most important stat in every generation of pokemon but okay, I guess you're coming at this from a purely casual perspective not a competitive one, and in that context it does make sense.
@@calebmon ... I was agreeing with you and expanding on the reasons why, and disagreeing with you about it making sense in a purely casual context. Why all the animosity?
this is awesome. great job analyzing RBY OU meta and mechanics. I really wish you luck trying to bring the gameplay into the modern day with your game!
Just found this channel today and the way you interpret game design is so fascinating and insightful to me, you managed to put into words something I've struggled to describe for a while, how I enjoy the stories told by balance and drama in gameplay quite often more than a game's proper "plot." The barrier system of this game intrigues me the most out of everything you've talked about in these dev logs, and has me dying to try out the combat! I'm wondering how you plan on handling access to barriers, if they'll all be available to the player from the start or unlocked in the first few chapters, or something else, that could have a huge affect on the balance and team building aspects of the game. I also think it may be fun if barriers could be swapped around between party members like a job system of sorts, allowing for experimentation with different 3-barrier loadout combos. You don't have to answer these questions necessarily, part of me does want to retain some mystery around this project until it's available to play. Mostly just commenting to share my first impressions. Love this idea, best of luck with development brother!
Thanks you!! I'm definitely strongly playing around with the idea of unlocking some equipable barriers through various means. I can think of several narrative justifications and fun ways to integrate it. Would potentially add a lot to a playthrough to have a handful of optionally unlockable ones. Swapping barriers I didn't think about but definitely, now giving some thought, could potentially be really interesting.
In the Tauros vs Executor scenario, the drama is only apparent to us, because we're familiar with the game mechanics and can see the possible outcomes. A new player doesn't even know Executor's moveset or if they need a crit to kill. There's no drama if the player doesn't know what's happening. I hope your game provides the player the information they need to appreciate the story of the battles. Also, most players aren't rational when it comes to probability. They expect good luck for themselves, and interpret bad luck uncharitably. During a playthrough, a 1/256 miss will be perceived as a net negative by players, even when it factually wasn't, because they will remember their own misses more strongly than their opponent's. I would caution against attaching raw, unmitigable RNG to something as volatile as missing an entire turn.
Competitive players are rational about the probabilities though, they've been in that situation many times and have weighed the odds, and will make their decision based on a reading of the current game state.
@nicholaschan4481 sure but the drama of which choice to make is there for them and they must weigh the odds in their minds and go through it so your point about the drama not being apparent isn't true with them
I agree communication with the player and tinkering with values to make them feel best is super important. Possibly overriding the rules of the game in certain contexts (eg. certain spells or conditions) to improve game feel as well is something important to always consdier. I'll show plenty of examples of how I'm going to communicate with the player in future videos, and I'll get feedback as people play demos I release.
really like that art style, you got me interested in that game of yours even if I disagree a lot with lots of things you said about gen 1 if I have time, I want to try this demo you mention gen 5 still the best tho
Honestly this video really struck a cord with me in my own journey of taking pokemon and building it to my liking. One thing that I feel like was grazed by the video do miss is Normal types feeling like legitimate threats in their own right, not just as wastebaskets but the ones with powerful options to use with their Same Type Attack Boost pretty much making most of the types half of a super effective hit. But nowadays its pretty much obsolete when all of the types have the same powerhouse moves now. A Body Slam from a Tauros loses its luster when Arcanine can do a Fire type Double-Edge that can take away almost 3/4ths of the Exeggutors health in one hit (barring critical hits). Which lets the Arcanine user just win in the team builder without any in-battle drama whatsoever. Game Freak's solution to this problem was to give normal types a movepool so deep and yet it doesn't matter because you can only pick four moves and you don't get STAB on them. Which leads to that movepool bloat that just leaves the mon almost identityless. Which just leads me to the question, why be a jack of all trades when you have 6 Pokemon in a team? On the other hand, the 1/256 glitch being a mechanic while leading to drama is only going to lead to frustration to a casual audience because they don't want to see a story play out, they want to optimize the fun out and win the challenge. I feel like making it more obvious by letting every 100% accurate move be dropped down to be 99% accurate would work because it bluntly communicates that there is still inherent risk. That being said, I love how you can take lessons from a game many that is seen as archaic and "a buggy disaster" and see the diamonds in the rough that is this nearly 30 year old passion project. Its commendable and makes me think to study more games that are seen to "not age that well" and go down to their level. I'd love to see more of this, but for now I think I have a devlog to binge now, thank you Howard, you've earned a new subscriber.
That's such a great point about move pools there, I wish it occurred to me to mention that, it's something I've thought exactly the same way about. You're definitely right about the 99% thing. An implementation along those lines could be the much better option. I have some ideas I'm playing around with I'll report on soon. And yes, I absolutely think people sleep on many elements found in old game design way too often, I'll have a lot more to say in the future on the topic. Thanks!!
Great video! I finally get why gen3+ games just don't hit the same for me. As a casual player who doesn't want to min max, memorize a spreadsheet of abilities, or look up optimal strategies, the abilities introduced in gen3 just felt like ass pulls to me. The battles no longer had a reasonable tension to them with easily readable opponents, but felt like random bullshit.
I think the biggest "what" of the G1 game design is Moltres. There is this unspoken rule of that Gym Leader TMs are not available via level-up (with exception of Pikachu in Yellow), so of course Moltres does not get Fire Blast like how Articuno and Zapdos get Blizzard and Thunder... but Leer? Really??? You could have given it Flamethrower. Oh yeah also some moves are hilariously undertuned. What were they smoking with 50BP 65% accurate Rock Throw??? -oh yeah also don't think you can sneak in The Primal Scene That Girl Saw past me-
It is very funny how Moltres needs a tm for fire blast and doesnt level into flamethrower. As for some very move designs, I definitely wanna talk about some in the future. I've been modding some stuff and one fun thing I added was disable letting you see your opponent's moves and pick one. I started on a metronome redesign where you can select the type upon use which should be really fun.
I think the excitement of these gen 1 types of battles is only truly possible when all Pokemon are the same level because over leveling makes the fights trivial, and when type advantage doesn't guarantee an easy victory just because someone had studied the player's guide beforehand. So I like that you said your game will have no xp gain to solve the first problem, and it seems like you're leaning much more toward status affects and buffing your character to win instead of just winning a rock paper scissors match like in Pokemon. And I agree with you, gen 1 was not meant to be a prototype, Game Freak didn't know if the game would even sell at the time! It seems Game Freak really wanted to have rng reign supreme in gen 1 no matter what strategies the player came up with to win, which can either make the game incredibly exciting or incredibly frustrating. It seems like Game Freak changed a lot of the battling mechanics in the later gens to have rng play less of a role in determining who wins. I agree this can make the battles feel less like a ridiculous anime-like fight, but in turn it does make the player feel like they can win based more on their smarts and not just luck. I feel like the perfect rpg can balance both skill and luck well, so as to give the player an exciting time while also allowing them to learn how to outsmart said luck to win in spite of it.
Yeah, all very true. That's why I want to try and do everything I can to prevent stuff that legitimately feels frustratingly random. It'll be a bit of an iterative process and might involve changing things as I go, but I'm going to make sure there's no lazy changes eg. just nerfing something too strong without thinking about the intended design.
@@howard_blast btw what's your rationale for the more "stiff" side-on pose for Reiya's battle sprite rather than a more martial stance? Great work on the battle effects!
I've noticed whenever a game does something good unintentionally, it rarely gets carried over to the sequel due the devs never learning why what they did was good. They usually end up "fixing" their "mistake". Gunz the duel is a great example. It unintentionally had a lot of animation cancels which lead to crazy high, carpal-tunnel inducing, skill ceiling that garnered competitive interest in a game that otherwise would've been meh. Then they made gunz 2 which "fixed" this (probably trying to not scare away casuals) but from what I heard it was kinda meh. Honestly, the dynamics caused by the single special stat is part of why I still go back and play gen1 (actually just did after watching this video the first time, love the new thumbnail btw). Though I do wish there was a bit more variety to the moveset. I get teaching body slam, earthquake, thunderbolt, blizzard to the all-around normal type tauros, but does the poison/ground nidoking need to have the same best moves? I'll give gen1 credit for the mons having a unique identity despite the limited move pool, but wish it was a bit more expanded (but not as bloated as modern gens) That's part of why I like gen3. Also, while it has the split sp atk/def, moves are still physical/special based on type. Meaning that these different archetypes excel at different type coverage, which imo gives the types a stronger identity and can have trade-offs that need to be considered in team building. The real reason I play gen3 more (and pokemon in general) is it has repeatable endgame. After putting so many hours to my save file, I don't really want to reset it just to play again with a different build, and sometimes only slightly different. And usually when I get to the end of an rpg, I see so many ways my team can still be improved, but there's no way for the game to even acknowledge any continuous improvement. The battle frontier's win streak system isn't perfect. Since the difficult stops increasing past a point it's just "how long do you want to grind until you hit bad rng?" If the series of battles increased in difficultly forever, that would be better. Other ways could be like hades' heat system, counting the "cycles" to beat a boss like hsr, or just set some +X% power increase on the boss where the highest +X% you can beat is your score. I bring that last point up because I hope you consider adding to Orkastle some form of repeatable end game with a performance metric. The "performance metric" being the important part as it encourages deeply mastering the games mechanics, while offering a another way to compare your performance to other players outside of a multiplayer vs mode that might be dead after a period of time (think arcade players who master every mechanic for a higher score). There's so many rpgs that have interesting mechanics to explore and master (even ones that focus more on story) but there's no way to do that. The story was wrapped up nicely, but it feels like to game is left without a conclusion.
Super interesting, I didn't know about the Gunz case. And yeah that's such a big thing I find, and one of the many reasons I can often find the first entry in game series to be my favorites. It's very easy in the medium of games for refinement or intention to refine to actual delete appeal or features. Gen 3 for sure hits a great balance with what you're describing, and I often think of it as the point before the series starting toppling on its own weight, gameplay-wise. It was always a point where I felt overall very satisfied with the series even if it didn't go the direction I initially wanted. In my own game, I absolutely want to avoid that excessive best move overlap seen in Gen 1 you're describing, cuz it definitely can get awkward lol. And yeah as for the type of replayability you're describing, absolutely will be something I'm going to stress about, so it's nice to hear what kinds of aspects of that appeal to people. It's something I've always personally valued, I'm the type to go back to favorites all the time, and in current year Steam happens to really reward replayability in games, sales algorithm-wise. Little bits of setbacks (eg. got a terrible flu), but updates soon!
Thunder and Ice, starting magic spells... Hmmm... I know it's probably not it, but I always think of Squall from Final Fantasy 8 because his two starting summons are ice and thunder.
nice to see a gameplay update and smart idea of cross-promotion by plugging into the poketube audience. also, fun use of the rewrite ost and yugioh fm battle music (i like how the latter coincides with getting more into the battle mechanics).
🥂 I'll mostly be rolling with this format for a while because it's a lot more fun for me and probably viewers as well than straightforward follow-up 'logs. Some vids periodically will just be me monologuing over Orkastle footage when there's a bunch of new game stuff to show off at once (vid after next will be like that).
Your character art is cute and expressive, I like it! Your take in Gen1 mechanics is interestingly unique too. What are your thoughts on an equivalent of badge boosts and the badge boost glitch?
Thank you! I honestly never gave too much thought to badge boosts and the glitch, since it's not in stadium or multiplayer where you're really inclined to notice things like that more, but I do love the stat reapplication glitch, and have been brainstorming equivalents that make sense. In general, I really love the way the mechanic interlocks things and turns adds contextual strategy to lots of scenarios, similar to the way I enjoy Special being one stat. More is happening in one motion.
Hey, I didn't finish watching the video yet, but when you said "a Tauros set that seeks to tank hits" I think you would like a format called Nintendo Cup 1997, I'd love to tell you more about it, but some of the best players use a Tauros set consisting of Bodyslam/Doubleteam/Rest/Substitute (Or Blizzard or Hyperbeam) Blizzard had a 30% chance to freeze.
i think you were touching upon this somewhat, but something i really love about gen 1 is how it's designed first and foremost as a single player experience, with the multiplayer elements existing moreso as a way of socializing with other players than for the sake of high level competition. your mention of asymmetrical types in gen 1 definitely folds into this well. i feel like newer generations tend to try and balance everything too much, to the point that individual types begin to lose their identity. i appreciate how gen 1 instead focuses on how each element contributes to an exciting and varied experience across a playthrough, with a lot of individual pokemon fitting fairly cleanly into traditional archetypes, such as how you mention tauros acts much like a traditional jrpg protag. i definitely think gen 1 has issues when it comes to actual competitive play, seeing the same three pokemon in every match with a lot of stuff that feels like nonsense when it's used against you isn't going to make for a very engaging competitive scene in my eyes, but again i figure that the primary purpose of multiplayer elements in gen 1 was never to create a complex metagame, it was so little jimmy and his buddies on the playground could show off what they have and engage in low level, casual competition.
Big agree, yeah. I love Gen 1 competitive, but I'd never champion the metagame as some competitive masterpiece. My goal with my own game isn't to create the "best competitive experience" either for a pvp mode, but I do want to make something that people at least have a hard time fault-finding with, while pursuing everything I love about Gen 1 and its pvp meta.
I really like what you're taking from gen 1, one thing you may want to take from gen 3 is how the AI tries to fight the player for tempo since you mentioned wanting a nuanced AI system
interesting, i'm not sure if i'm completely sold on your vision yet but i'll definitely check out the demo when it drops (also that side shot of reiya is so good 😭😭😭), what's with the imperial flag in your banner though? doesn't that have kinda bad connotations?
Thanks! 🥂 I got set back a little from the worst flu of my life, but update really soon. As for the flag, it's just a character from Index who's cool and doubles a little as an inside joke going back years when some friends would bust on me for being a high tier weeb. It'll get replaced with something related to my game/channel more directly very soon.
I played Yellow as a kid, but I based my own game on the systems from gen VI onward (albeit, with many alterations), because that's when I returned to the game. I hadn't really considered the benefits of having a single special stat.
Yeah, I think emulators can even emulate the connector pack to Stadium on N64 emulators. I know phone emulators have straight up emulated the link cable features which is pretty cool. For any interesting gameplay challenges, you have to play Stadium (Japanese 1 and Japanese 2, or just American 1 (which was Japanese 2, kind of confusing)). Or just Showdown in browser.
99.99% of what they are talking about in the video really only applies to competitive gen 1 which you can play on pokemon Showdown, in the actual game you just click your strongest move with your strongest pokemon and instantly one shot everything for the whole playthrough just like every other pokemon. The tension between whether to switch out tauros or risk the sleep, whether to click Hyper beam or body slam, whether Tauros misses or not, whether the sleep powder misses or not, all that truly wonderful stuff is felt by the player immensely in competitive gen 1, and it is the generation that does that stuff constantly, it is a roller coaster ride of a meta, and would def recommend it. This video is 100% correct about how gen 1 feels to play competitively. As for actual single player gameplay though, you can def do better in the pokemon series.
If I might suggest one thing about giving feedback to the player : Even if it is technically a chance to miss, better phrase it as the opponent evading the attack. That way the player gets less frustrated by his character's "incompetence" making him/her miss a turn, the blame is instead on the opponent and the player will be less tempted to rant on about game balance being broken or whatever ;) Also Reiya best gal, meganekko FTW !
@howard_blast wanted to follow up, but you can go in a very similar direction with TMs and map design. TMs were a specifically placed one time use power bump. Its the equivalent of giving one mon a training arc in a story. It gives variability on who you give it to, but it helps mold one characters immediate and future growth. Making tms reuse is tragic. Making most tms buy able early is also tragic. They work best as well place single use items with an early purchasable subset. Maybe provide different subsets by city or a late game mega store. Map design is similar. Tm place ment, alternate routes, longer dungeon routes as gates to new zones, mon type availability, gen2 swarm events, etc. There is a lot to say, but the way I would think about it is zones with dungeons or keys to move between allows open exploration but limited character and story access. Slap on special or hidden events to get a character early or a hidden character. Anyways Gen 1 and 2, have a clear different direction than the rest and it's a community bias parading as game desion fact to think the newer direction is just universally better
I feel like you won't add this, because of your opinion on hidden power and more obtuse mechanics, but I'll ask anyway. Will your game have something close to gen 1 counter? That move is really unintuitive but it's also one of the coolest skill shots I've ever seen in a turn based RPG. Correctly guessing if your opponent will switch out and countering his previous damage onto his next mon, trying to store your own damage and then baiting your enemy into switching by using a mon with predictable counterplay or the ability of your own status moves not cancelling your possibility of being able to counter
I didn't talk about it cuz it didn't fit with this vid and I still have some cooking to do, but short answer, Yes, absolutely there will be something similar to counter. Multiple versions actually. I absolutely love Gen 1 counter despite the fact that it's weird. Since I'm making a game about magicians, it definitely won't be hard to make these counter moves makes proper sense from a flavor/lore standpoint. When the Chancey dedicated video comes out, I'll talk all about this. Thanks for asking!
Why is biting a ghost super effective? I liked it better when bite was a normal type move. I can understand retroactively making Magenmite a steel type or karate chop becoming a fighting type move but making bite a dark type move always bothered me, it would only really make sense if ghost types were immune to all physical moves instead of normal and fighting type but this probably didnt happen because it would make ghost op. THey could have made Magnemite and Magneton steel type in gen 1 dragon and ghost only had mons from one evolutionary line so it could have been done but they probably didn't want a Pokemon to have a type that there were no moves for. Zubat and Golbat could arguably be dark types instead of poison since they are nocturnal darkness dwelling bats and leech life a blood sucking move seems more dark than bug. Arguably Psyduck and Golduck should be dual water psychic types there's a lot of what ifs to ponder if we start questioning types and mechanics. What if ghost types were immune to psychic types pokemon. In game dialogue with npcs in red and blue suggest ghost types are supposed to check psychic types but the only ghosts are also part poison and ghost has no damaging moves or immunity to psychic what if ghosts were immune to psychic though. Interestingly in yellow some npc dialogue was changed to remove the references to ghost beating psychic types.
All good food for thought! And yeah, funny you mention, but Dark/あく type i definitely always felt a lot of aesthetic dissonance with. I think the concept is cool but aspects really bother me.
Aren't you worried about the loss in engagement that randomness gives in a single player game? In a competitive real world scenario like pokemon, the thrill is given by betting against a live human being who's going to react to your gamble working out or blowing up in your face, but don't players in a single player experience tend to see randomness as a simple hindrance? (think people's opinions on Morrowind/Oblivion mechanics and "misses").
Morrowind misses are huge issues because they make no sense. Visually, the attack is connected. Misses don't add drama in Morrowind either since they just provide a brief moment of wasted motion before you do the exact same attack again. As for a single player experience that exploded recently BECAUSE of randomness, there's Balatro. Forbidden Memories has remained a classic, loved for its RNG gauntlet as well. The key to making the player interested in RNG and "unfairness" is going to be the narrative, which I'll be sure to show people in more depth in future videos. As long as the player feels part of a story they're interested in, and the RNG is an extension of that, they'll accept and enjoy it.
@howard_blast I do think that the decisions AI make will feel a lot more like randomness while playing against a human just feels different, you are trying to predict what another person is going to do in this situation based on previous knowledge of their playstyle, I've yet to play an AI that has felt the same way it does to play against a real person, instead of prediction and mind games it feels more like, is this AI gonna randomly do X or randomly do Y. Or is the AI deterministic in it's attacking patterns and therefore easily manipulated into losing, in either case it just doesn't feel the same way as it does in a real competitive match will, so as a designer you will have to do something interesting to try and get this feel right, not saying it's impossible either, just idk anyone who has done it right before! Good luck though! You're game will be interesting to play regardless.
@willmaud2359 right but would that feel fair? Would it feel like it does when a real human reads your move or would it feel like an unfair cheating computer? I've never had a computer feel like it wasn't cheating in such situations. It basically just feels like randomness instead of it actually being able to read you. Unlike a real person doing the samething.
RBY is a fun gen; a lot of love was put into it. I play Red on my phone while waiting in lines. That said, praising Tauros's abstract access to Blizzard while criticizing later games' switch moves by saying they "don't even make sense" feels disingenuous. Aren't both in service of drama and storytelling within combat, as you've said? In the Tauros examples, a case that was ignored is that both Mr. T and Eggy could miss their moves. Wouldn't this situation be a huge problem for drama? These kinds of little double standards and oversights piled up across the video and really soured me on the whole thing. Your art is nice though, you've obviously practiced your lineart and shading a lot. Good luck with your game.
I explained in the video that Tauros specifically feels like a spellcaster, which goes well with his visual design and movepool design and the concept of normal types as a whole. In the case both miss their moves, the battle simply continues, so it's not an end case, it's just an extender of the current situation. Thanks for the complement and gl!
I wouldn’t say RBY were the best designed games, a lot of what makes the OU battles fun is accident lol, but I wouldn’t call them bad either…..i definitely didn’t like how so many move types barely exist, and didn’t particularly like how move types were automatically categorized to either be special or physical…..had there been more dragon and bug etc type moves and all move types could be special OR physical, I dare say RBY would’ve been absolutely perfect (aside from Onix and Farfetch’d and a couple others being so blatantly terrible lol, but I digress)
Yeah, I prefer to think about what could have been iterated off RBY as a base. I certainly exaggerate when I say it's without a doubt the best designed, because it's hard to make a complete case for it unto itself, but I 100% beleive it's a superior launching point for game design than any other generations. That's one of the reasons I'll be making videos about little mods I make. I want to show how my brain perceives the best way to improve these games.
i have played gens 1 to 4, and guess which is my most played? gen 1 of course! why? because i like the simplicity of it! i actually like the idea of crits being based of of speed, i like the fact that special is a single stat, i like that eevee only has 3 eeveelutions, i like that gens take on the normal type, i like that blizzard has 90% accuracy as opposed to 70, i like the way hyper beam works there now of course, i got lost in a tangent again... anyway, heres a few suggestions for your game no1: i think that your random miss chance should be 1% no2: id double down on this random miss chance, and make regular physical attacks be 95% accurate rather than 99% now of course, its up to you wether to listen to these suggestions, but even if you dont, i will give one piece of advice: when making something in a game, test out the extremes first, then find a balance between
Based, I like the train of thought of those suggestions, I got other people suggesting things along a similar line, so I definitely have some interesting ideas in mind that I think could make things potentially really fun.
@@howard_blast yeah, also another idea i had came to me right about now. and that is, instead of having a chance to miss, it is instead a chance to fail the attacks in another way. mainly that they deal drastically lower damage, and have no hope of delivering a secondary effect. id call that mechanic a "fumble", the idea doing so could allow you to increase the "fumble" chance even further without increasing player frustration too much. you would still have your non direct damage eg status moves still miss instead of doing a weaker effect, but lets be real, a fumbled attack is chip damage anyways, right?
I always felt like the only person who liked gen 1 misses because I always thought of them less as "missing" and more as "dodging", as if your character has a slight edge to be able to dodge a move. Which is actually what the modern "friendship" mechanics claim to do. However, I don't like the modern mechanic because it's 1-sided. You're gonna tell me that a gym leader who has been a leader longer than I've been a trainer doesn't have maxed out friendship with their Pokemon? Granted, for a competitive multi-player game, I totally get this missing/dodging mechanic being removed, as competitive games need some level of guarantees and can make more rewarding outcomes riskier, which accuracy already does on its own. But for single player, I think a dodging system is a great idea and I'd even double down on it, increasing the dodge rate by 1/256 for every stat point you have buffed, and decreasing it by 1/256 for every stat you have debuffed. And maybe double that for speed stat changes. Cap that at 12/256 increase so with the 1/256 innate chance you have up to a roughly 5% chance to dodge, and maybe do another 6 or 7/256 decrease in dodging for having status conditions or increase in dodging if your opponent has a status, and you've got roughly 7.5% chance of evasion possible without touching the evasion stat. With this kind of change, I may even remove evasion affecting moves, though I think I'd keep accuracy affecting moves. Buffing or debuffing accuracy can be a powerful tool to overcome your own weaknesses or magnify your opponents weaknesses, but I think evasion boosting is somewhat double dipping and perhaps too much with this system. I like the idea of evasion continuing to be somewhat unreliable and difficult, but plain missing because you're kneecapped or doing something difficult to be somewhat. Like, thinking of a real fight, whether I'm in the zone or not, dodging a quick jab is gonna be really difficult, and blocking, catching, or totally evading a highly telegraphed kick is gonna be relatively easy. But getting in the zone will help me see through my opponent's guard or even how they're going to move after a block so I can more easily land my next hit. It naturally helps more with offense than defense, in my experience and from the people I've talked to (though, it can help a decently with blocking, but usually not to the same degree as striking). I think reflecting this in game, with slight chances of dodging for buffs could be really cool. Not sure if I'd apply those buffs to accuracy in any way, but it may be interesting, if you totally buff yourself like crazy, for Hyper Beam to go from 90 accuracy to 100 cause of all of your buffs, thus removing the need for accuracy modifiers too. But that may be too broken. I am liking the idea of playing with this though. Might be worth testing out. The single special stat is also an interesting idea I think I get what they were going for, but even having atk1 atk2, def1, def2 can lead to some interesting balance, like how a lot of fighting types can't strike specially well, but are highly capable special defenders, while only being okay physical defenders. They both have their own nuances that can lead to unique play. I don't think the single special attack ever really was too much of a problem for skillful special users, but more so an issue for one's like fighting types who had awful special and thus could never really bulk through special moves without becoming special monsters, unless you just wanted to take a Chansey approach with them and give them insane HP with low special and defense (though I know Chansey had great special in gen 1, I'm just making an example of how high HP would need to start to get to offset lower mixed defenses to simulate the defensive layout you really might want to have without overpowering offensive potential). In the end, I get why they made the decision to split the special stat, and I get why you like it. It's one of the things that keeps me coming back to gen 1. I also love how the critical hit system worked, with so many ways to guarantee crits, and speed helping with that, but also that they were capped by ignoring all stat changes, including your own. I get why this was changed in future generations too, but I do particularly like this because it makes for such interesting flavor for the Pokemon with higher speed stats, and offers a benefit of better being able to capitalize off buffs for slower Pokemon. Now if gen 1 just got bulk up back ported to it to be a slightly weaker physical amnesia. Maybe nerf amnesia to 1 stat point boosting too, since 2 stages in offensive and defensive stats in a single turn is kinda insane. Or buff the back ported bulk up to also do 2 stages, cause sometimes the crazy stuff is really fun
That's a great point. It really does feel the miracle dodge when you get that miss. I'm liking all these accuracy ideas you're throwing out. I actually already had plans following a similar vector that I was gonna test out a decent bit before talking about. I'm def gonna reference the ideas here for some inspiration. And yeah, you're completely right that I kind of conveniently skipped over the limitations of special being locked into one stat lol. What I didn't mention is how I actually like a lot of those limitations even though it screws over certain types of mons hard, but the nice thing about making your own game is you can always just add in some kind of work around for balance, any type of mechanic is on the table. Bulk up or a super bulk up in Gen One could have been super interesting, didn't think of that. I periodically mod Red and Blue in little ways (I plan on making some vids about this) using the really nice disassembly, so that could be a fun thing to do different implementations of. Thanks for the great comment!! Helps a lot.
@@howard_blast yeah, happy to help. Actually, I'd love to get into modding myself, but I have no idea how to start with the disassemblies. I forked them onto my github, but don't really know how to get them set up to start working with them 😅 do you have any programs you like to work with to edit and reassemble the disassemblies?
I'm okay at programming but I'm just so bad about sorting through which environments to use and getting set up. I don't know why. If I don't follow specific guides on getting set up, I often just struggle through endless non-computing errors in my brain with this sort of stuff really frequently, no clue why, and it's really frustrating. Like I've already done all this analysis, but I haven't been able to get set up in the environment to test these ideas and plans that I've come up with
this is a good analysis. I hope this isn't a bad spot for the criticism on your game's concept art. I don't know if you're the artist or had someone else do it or what the situation for that is, but I see some problems that I believe would lead to unnituitiveness regarding the gameplay. I noticed with the game you're talking about, it's really hard to tell what roles in the party your characters are meant to fulfill based on their designs, which messes with the intuitiveness. Looking at Kannyo, Yuriel, and Reiya. Kannyo looks like a squishy healer/mage, Yuriel looks like a frail physical attacker with utility spells, and Reiya looks like a magical glass cannon. So, seeing their intended roles makes me go "what?" It's bad for players who tend to feel things out instead of looking at the numbers, I think. Like, the Gen 1 Pokemon designs of Tauros, Chansey, & Snorlax all convey what they're supposed to be. Tauros is a muscular bull, which screams fast physical attacker with some bulk; Snorlax is a fat fucking bear, which says slow & bulky but hints at the capacity for damage; and Chansey is a fat orb with almost entirely round shapes, heavily pointing towards a supportive tank character. If I were to suggest edits on the characters, I'd recommend making changes to their body types. Reiya would definitely look more like a physical attacker if she had visible muscles. She can still be small and slim; those traits imply that she's fast but frail; but she needs something in her design to imply that she's physically geared instead of magically geared. If your game has a weapon system, this distinction could be somewhat moot since having her clearly wielding a weapon might help. I think I see a knife in her back pocket? That should be more prominent in her official art I think, since it emphasizes that she uses weapons. I think the way her shoes & leggings look works perfectly fine.The large shoes help emphasize speed & the lightweight outfit also does that. Depending on how much you want to exaggurate proportions, you could make her legs larger proportional to her body to further emphasize her speed. I'm not really sure what "brave" magic is intended to mean, like, I assume it's an element, no clue on what aesthetic you're giving it. But her current design reads as "electric" to me. It's because she has the most modern-like fashion out of the three. While all three characters have a similar pallet, Reiya's outfit sort of looks like it has neon highlights, which leans almost into a scifi-like aesthetic. She has very modern looking shoes too and her short & unruly hair also reads as a modern style. I think her outfit may need some sort of rework? I'm not sure entirely what your game's aesthetic is meant to be, just that everyone else's design looks like it's trying to lean somewhat towards standard fantasy while her design leans more scifi. Yuriel's design for the most part is fine. Without overhauling the aesthetic, there's not much I can think of to sell the point of mixed attacker better, but I will say that she does not read as a bulky character. She reads as a fast but frail one. Some of the traits leaning into that are her physical frame being small, you might want to make her slightly wider to imply that she can take a hit or two. Perhaps giving her a more top-heavy silhouette may help lean into the idea that she's got weight to throw around? Her scarf also implies that she's built for speed. Scarves evoke the idea of fast and frail. I think if the scarf was replaced with a cape, that would probably work better without messing with her design too much. Capes are more associated as an accessory for armored knights. I also think she should have some light armor in her outfit. Right now it looks like any attack would just tear through her clothing. She looks like she might be going for a white knight aesthetic? That could be worth potentially leaning into? The main issue with her design really is just that she looks way too frail for my mind to associate with "bulky mixed attacker." Yuriel's main magic type being evil does not read through her design at all. I'm assuming this is meant to be intentional. Right now her main element looks like either light or wind. Light because of her being the only of the three characters with white clothing, and wind because of the light-weight appearance and scarf. I think her design should have some hint at her using evil magic. I'd personally mess with her eye color. My first thought is red eyes. But you could also try obsidian eyes, violet eyes, some lore-relevant eye color, what-have-you. You could even give her eyes a slight gradient or have some weird shading with the highlights. But I do think her relationship with evil magic should be more present in her design. If I were to guess based on the attire she wants to reject her magic. And that can be leaned into. If she's rejecting her magic, is that meant to imply she's rejecting a core part of herself? If so, something should feel off about her design. Is it a situation where she's weaponizing evil magic to fight evil? Then her design should probably signify her main element. Kannyo is the worst offender of the three. While Reiya's design clearly communicates "fast" and Yuriel's design communicates "attacker," Kannyo's design just doesn't look like a wall. Her design communicates that she's not meant to be a damage dealer due to her having a nun-like aesthetic. Which led me to think either "some sort of healing magic user, either holy or water or something like that." I like the pouch in her outfit. It gets across the idea that she's well-prepared for the non-stabby parts of battle. I think the design should lean a lot more into her being bottom-heavy since that implies that she's stable and immovable. I think she should also be much more wide as fatter characters are often associated with tankiness. I think something should be done to make her outfit look more armored. I do like the current outfit. The cloth looks thick and insulated, which is good, but it's too subtle of a hint towards her tankiness in my opinion. I don't really draw anime girls, but I kinda want to make some sketches to better illustrate what I mean.
I think the key factor here is seeing them in the context of the story. The thing with anime character designs is that they're built to put emphasis on their differences from each other rather than express themselves so directly in a vacuum. It's the type of thing that supposed to click when you see them in action but isn't instantly necessarily instantly communicated. Princess Connect does a really good job of this. Miyako for example certainly doesn't look like a wall at first glance, but when you get a feel for her stubborn personality, the fact that she's a ghost, and her ability to summon giant puddings, being an unkillable fighter starts to make a lot of sense. Kannyo is absolutely going to have an emphasis on healing and holy spells, but I also want her to be really hard to break through. Magic is really important here. It's important to emphasize the magic is dominant in determining how these characters function. When they express their personalities and how that affects what magic they use, it should all fall into place. That being said, there are some intended variations in body type expression, but they're more subtle. Some of it gets a little lost in pixels sometimes, but with enough full res art of the characters done, you'll eventually notice that Reiya is a bit leaner, while Kannyo is a bit softer, stuff like that. This is typically how anime illustrators handle most characters, they first focus on expressing characters through relative rather than obvious differences, altho focusing on obvious differences does happen too sometimes ofc. Thanks for the detailed feedback though, I'll definitely keep all this in mind.
A game could certainly work that way, and that could be an interesting implementation, but it would be a more limited system effectively making all physical hits inherently stronger attacks (without types taken into account) per attack point than special attacks. For Pokemon, this would demand a physical wall like Rhydon have an obscene HP stat, and his special stat would have to be reduced to basically nothing to make sure he's not specially bulky. But it could work, a game designed around this would just have to be careful about how the physical attacks it distributes are and how hard it is to boost your attack power in battle.
Ah but what if, like special, your attack was no longer an attack stat only, but both attack and defense, call it idk strength stat. Then it would be like having a gen 1 special stat in both physical and special attacking types. I think this could work in a simplier game.
7:53 stealth rocks only stab into pokemon that move drastically, ie coming out of a pokeball, that's why they activate on switch they have the same amount of power because... the pokemon isnt putting their physical or mental strength into it? its just like throwing some sharp magic rocks out and then letting them do their thing. i agree that the originals are fun and interesting in their own way, but this REALLY isnt to say that that more recent games aren't. you can't rant about every little flaw the newer games have, while ignoring all those present in the originals. i DO agree that more recent games suffer from powercreep to a kind of silly extent though, urshifu and maybe also fluttermane especially. this is an issue that needs to be fixed, but it alone does not completely devalue every single generation after one. 11:40 also i totally disagree with the idea that normal type has become "bland type", i'd say it's more "animal" or "beast" type most of the time
I respect the opinion of power fantasy over balance, but i feel like you play up how intuitive some of the gen 1 mons were because its your favorite. There is nothing intuitive about the bull spamming blizzards lmao. Also respectfully, players tend to disproportionately remember when the RNG was not in their favor. I've had someone take 2 mons in a row to full paraflinch togekiss, then say "Hax" when i crit them. A chance of missing no matter how small, or i guess ESPECIALLY when its really small will feel awful when it does happen for most players. I agree that it adds to the storyline of a battle, but gotta be a lil careful with some of those
The absolute 1-2 combo of checking out a defense case of Gen 1's mechanics but it turns out to be a disguised ad for a guy's underaged loli waifu JRPG. I don't know what I expected.
at 5:26 it seems like you're saying a low chance thing happening randomly is an "asspull" but then you praise the 1/256 chance thing as "special". i don't get it
A situation where there's 1 singular outcome that feels as if it should be the outcome (ie. is by far most likely) is where the lower probability outcome feels asspully. No one is going to prepare a defense for something that only happens 1 in 10 times, for example. But, if you have a scenario where both outcomes are likely enough to have to be prepared for, you can easily throw in a 3rd very rare scenario without it feeling cheap, because players are not mentally locked in to only treating a single scenario as fair.
Great video. As of scarlet and violet, the gen 1 games are still my favorites of the franchise but I could never fully articulate why. But I think you did a good job in at least beginning to explain why that is here.
Finally! While I prefer splitting Special into SP.Attack and SP.Def, I would keepi Gen 1 Pokemon Special stats close to themselves. However what I really miss from Gen 1 are: Speed based critical hit ratio (probably I would base it on current speed and probably rebalance multiplier a bit (so Venusaur wouldn't always crit with Razor Leaf) and 1/256 glitch which (until I leanrt that it was a bug) I always considered „Critical failure” (akin rolling a 1 in DnD), Probably that „critical miss” would need a bit of rebalancing (maybe even basing it on one of stats, speed maybe?).
I heard they ran the check twice in stadium so it amount to 1/256 times 1/256 ie. 1/65536, which is pretty funny, and definitely makes it feel like they didn't actually want it, but that's really cool if it was in fact intended!
One can switch and gain big potentially big advantage (or punishment) from doing so, but staying in long enough can also yield big advantage (or punishment), which is absolutely close enough to a game of chicken to compare it.
Does this guy think Tauros and Snorlax being OP in OU were PURPOSEFUL decisions lmao Other than calling emergent gameplay "design decisions," this is mostly a fine video. Edit: I am sorry, I watched more than a few minutes into the video and realized this is either satire or the worst possible defense of a reasonable conclusion. Gen 2+ is bad because... leftovers make for bad flavor (or "drama" - which doesn't even make sense if you've ever seen a Skarmory heal itself from >10% to full) and the absence of random misses isn't "intuitive"?
Man, if you're deep in the competitive rabbit hole, leftover munching might feel fine to you, but I can promise you my pokeballs that the average player does not enjoy something as unintuitive and frankly not satisfying like that. As for Tauros and Snorlax being OP, a solid 60% at least of that was by design. The devs didn't predict the meta, but the stats and movepools of mons in Gen 1 are so blatantly done with strong intent if you actually look at the full dex and how bold the mons contrast each other in their stats and movepools.
I forgot to mention, look at the mons used by your rival in the final battle. Of the mons he uses, 4 of them (Alakazam, Eggy, and Rhydon, and Gyarados) are OU viable. Pidgeot is there to characterize the rival as having a sense of attachment to the first pokemon he encountered outside his hometown, and the last one other than Arcanine is just the starter mon. Arcanine is there to fit the fire slot if there's no 'Zard, and is the only one that is clearly worse than devs intended, mostly by virtue of Fire type as a whole being undertuned in RBY. 'Lax was simply always intended to be OP, he's an in-game event, 2 per save file mon, and he's very iconic. He's also associated with trainer Red, and is on his team at the end of GSC, so yeah obviously intended to be a top tier mon.
@@howard_blast I have no idea what your arbitrary cutoff for popularity is, but there's over a million OU Pokemon games on Showdown a month. There are thousands of battles across all tiers at any given time. Clearly there's interest - **certainly** more interest than in speedrunning or doing solo runs - and even if the "average" player has no interest, it's OBVIOUS that competitive players are among the most dedicated players. Your argument is "I assure you, the average person does not enjoy academic scholarship about [subject]' - of course they don't! Mons having variable stats in no way leads one to conclude that the interactions you described in detail as being *intentional* were actually foreseen by developers.
@@howard_blast In the first place calling Gyarados OU viable is downright dishonest (he is a very niche E ranked Pokemon. You can say the same thing about Golduck or Dodrio. Porygon is higher ranked). The starter has NONE of the three mons every viable OU team *must* have (remember? those three the pokemon your video is about the *intentional* design of?). And his Exeggcutor has three moves. Still think this argument makes sense?
@@etymonlegomenon931 Hindsight is 20/20. I think the correct explanation is that a lot of decision with interesting("dramatic") consequences were done based on intuition, but in Gamefreak's more purposeful "corrective" measures, something was lost. What's being attempted is dissecting why those discarded, intuition-based decisions are interesting and worth building on.
Honestly.. Anyone that thinks the Combat in newer version of PKMN is something wrong with the franchise, is probably blind. EVERYTHING else with the PKMN games is the problem! But it's interesting to see someone taking strange lessons from a mess of a game to try and make something new with it! The simplistic combat back then wasn't the draw for me.. but the world, the adventure and the creatures. Nowadays, the almost rock-paper-scissor gameplay found in VGC is what makes PKMN good (as it is quite different and focused in mind games). So, seeing lolis immediately does not appeal to me. Good luck, but I don't see how something based on these ideas being actually popular. Specially since it is something that feels old and has evolved a lot already.
The appeal of my game is going to be the story writing first and foremost, but otherwise I'm going to put a ton of effort into finetuning the gameplay into something inherently addictive and satisfying. Lolis are going to take over the world soon.
*Lists a bunch of things that make gen one unbalanced and later gens better* And that's why gen one is the best balanced and most fun pokemon game by far.
If you want the most balanced turn based game, why aren't you playing chess or Japanese Go? If you insist on having RNG involved, there's always mahjong which is objectively more balanced than all Pokemon games. Should Pokemon just become one of those games?
@fuecOHKO I honestly think you're missing the point, it isn't that it is actually balanced which they never claimed to be the case. Its that the imbalance creates a type of tension in the player that few games have ever replicated, they create positions where you have to make incredibly tough calls and this drama makes gen 1 competitive play compelling in a way that almost nothing else can. Sure it's unbalanced, sure it's even broken at times, and it is definitely simplier in its design too, but these are unintentionally strengths in a weird way. You'd get it if you ever played gen 1 competitively.
Lol exactly. Gen 1 has its virtues, but the broken battling system is NOT one of them. A lot of these statements made in this video come across as someone with out much experience in the modern competitive scene. And there are just a lot of bold statements made without any real evidence to support it beyond ones interpretation of how the gen 1 system works. If you don't by into the very premise of gen 1 battles being filled with more drama then modern battles then the whole video collapses on itself
0:11 15 is not a good number on a game that promotes variety and asks you to catch'em all! Especially when "all" is 151 creatures, 10 times more! Bro just straight up choose to ignore the many many flaws in the old not very well programmed game and say it was the best designed game in the franchise. Like, the games ARE good (like any pokemon game), but you sound ridiculous.
Nah, man I laid out good points about how the game was designed to ultimately place the mons in a hierarchy. There's a lot more than 15 viable in OU anyway, one player, Heat From Fire, boasts an impressive 87% win ratio on ladder, often hitting number 1, and he always uses at least 1 of the notoriously "unviable" fire type mons to great effect. There's something closer to like 30 mons that you can genuinely use to your advantage, which is honestly kind of really big considering there's only like 81 fully evolved ones. Because Gen 1 is so stable with its meta also, the element of surprise in battle is absolutely huge, so it rewards less conventional picks a lot for good players. It also makes them waaaaay more interesting as unconventional picks.
It was well enough to say we were calling it early for the franchise back when new releases were still showing signs life, but the path from GSC to SV is *crystal* clear hindsight. It took them 3 generations to figure out how to do split special and universal crit rates in a way that made different pokemon feel unique and dynamic in a way that was innate to gen 1's mechanics. After that, there was nowhere left to go but gimmicks and they get sadder every gen. Face it kid, history has declared us the gen winners
GEN WONNNNN!!!!
Great interpretation of first gen Pokémon.
I still believe that the first gen greatly would’ve profited of more Pokémon having top tier viability by giving fighting a non useless move, bug types non trash bst, ghost a damaging move and special typing and a rock monotype for flavor.
I agree. This is one of the reasons I love modding it, which I'll talk more about soon.
I see so much potential and possibility in what path those games were walking down.
Love this vid! As a fan of gen 1-3 in particular, and as a game dev working on a combat based platformer, i love how you talk about things most other ppl rarely talk about, or brush under a rug, and bring up their merits. Theres a lot of asymmetrical balance that makes gen 1-3 special to me that the series lost over time. Id love to hear more about your combat system as time progresses. Keep up the good work!
Thank you!
Looking forward to eventually seeing what you're cooking.
Hey Howard. Nice video. Started with gen 4 myself, so I can't relate directly to the unique drama of gen 1. I think what happened is that Pokemon started as a JRPG, but quickly became its own thing. I can hardly imagine how gen 1's design philosophy could carry a never-ending franchise. On top of that, I'm not sure how much of gen 1's design choices were deliberate and how much it was improvised and based on intuition. So in subsequent games, when they put more "thought" into it, drama wasn't taken into account.
Very true, a lot of it is that.
You can actually straight up see how different designers/devs kind of poured different philosophies, aesthetics, and whims into it if you look through the context in which it was made, and it all formed this specific result due to the way it was wrangled together (+ other factors like restrictions).
Afterward, Pokemon was reflected upon as "Pokemon."
It's insanely interesting looking back, now with my perspective from making stuff myself and having that higher relatability.
It's really practical too if you can identify who was thinking what on the project because it solidifies your understanding of what goes into producing that specific final product. Really helps you understand what you want to be thinking about when developing yourself if you want your product to go in one direction vs another.
Honestly, could talk endlessly about this topic (design intent stuff with games), so I'll be organizing my thoughts for then.
I quite enjoyed the video but feel like it the for the most part avoided the elephant in the room that is ice beam, blizzard, and the freeze status. Mainly with tanky pokemon like Chansey or Lapras able to just sit there and spam it out, deal solid damage, and have a solid chance to outright get a kill with no counterplay to that. A mechanic so unhealthy for the game that it pushes the fire type entirely out of the meta just cause it can unthaw a frozen pokemon. You'll even have some trainers go out of their way to swap pokemon into negative status effects just to make sure they can't get one shot.
I was considering having a bit on freeze in the video, but it didn't have an elegant enough spot for it.
When I do my video like this focused on Chancey, I'll talk all about it and my extensive thoughts on it and all the ways I'm going to implement statuses differently, so look forward to that.
While I don't necessarily think that Gen 1 was the peak, I do vastly prefer the first three generations to how Pokémon progressed onward. And a lot of that is due to the more grounded, classic RPG philosophy established in Gen 1. Movepools got too wide, the types lost a lot of their texture due to how powerful everything has to be. Grass had less direct power, but a lot of utility, Steel attacks increased the user's stats, but aren't the best within themselves, Steel being a more defensive type by nature. Fire/Electric/Ice lead an elemental triangle, all with their own status, and powerful special attacks. Bug had an emphasis on multiple attacks, Fighting attacks dealt heavy damage, but were often situational (Counter, Cross-Chop, Submission, Hi-Jump Kick, Focus Punch). Ghost is immune to normal/fighting which is a massive advantage, but isn't really much of an attacking type, Gengar was still powerful without STAB.
Moves like X-Scissor, Scald, Close Combat and Special Shadow Ball ironically diluted Pokémon's mechanical personality by adding too much convenience, which is a common problem that even outside of combat, the series has suffered from.
Absolutely. Gen 2 and 3 actually shine in many of the same ways I complemented 1 here as well, but I couldn't fit in my thoughts in this video.
I’d add Gen 4 in there
I'd say close combat still fits as it does weaken you each time, so it fits thematically, and you can't just spam it. but yes I get your point, and as much as I love the simplicity of the 80 power 100% hit rate moves, it does really harm the theming of the types, as its then just a palette swap. so I am rather curious to see more of this, and hope to see more of that angle of the types.
Love this. I personally believe there are no bad mechanics, just bad implementation of mechanics, and also 'jank' is an important part of any media that helps make games good and the supposed 'flaws' a game may have help elevate them from being cookie cutter flat broad appeal products with the interesting points sanded down to smoothness (like many modern mainstream games and films). Looking forward to seeing this game of yours!
seriously, this is one of the BEST game balancing videos that i've ever seen in my life, this video opened my mind A LOT, and i'm also a game dev, thank you my friend :)))
Awesome, thank you!! Best of luck with your own gamedev ventures 🥂
I must admit these character designs look incredibly cute and marketable. Love how you show these girls off from side profiles.
Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth and Hacker's Memory has the INT stat. It effectively works the same as RBY Special. That mechanic is no longer unique to Pokemon as far as monster collector JRPGs go.
As a game developer, programmer and one whom has played a wide variety of games myself, I am inclined to think game balance can very easily be defined by effort vs reward. In a casual platformer, you need to go through the effort to be good at timing and aiming jumps to get rewarded with progression. This same principle can apply to Pokemon. In a casual playthrough, they do not just GIVE you Mewtwo at the start of the game. They intentionally made it so you gotta go through the effort of the story and Champion to get him. The same applies to the competitive format because there is very little effort to using Mewtwo to getting rewarded with steamrolling over most matchups and makes everything around much less interesting.
Frankly, Pokemon's hazard system is laughably terrible and unbalanced. Yo-Kai Watch 3 has a hazard system with monumentally better game design behind it. That game's battle system has far more "drama" because of how board placement works. You can walk AROUND the hazards and they only last for a few turns as opposed to Pokemon forcing you to put up with them and are permanent until cleared. Again, effort vs reward. Ya click Stealth Rock ONCE for effort and the reward is the opponent has all their Rock weak monsters at risk.
Yo-Kai Watch 3 also allows for far more specialization to make each monster unique while Pokemon even back in RBY had massive overlap issues.
That game also has Yo-Kai like Whisper and Pandle where crits are a mechanic that have far more control and more drawbacks. It's more intuitive that way. They boost crit on themselves or allies but are also at risk of taking more crits. Effort of teambuilding to boost crit and reward of greater crit rates.
Yo-Kai Watch 3 also has debuffs that can make monsters just randomly miss their turns. Clearing out any debuff in that game is a skill issue. Effort of clearing the debuff and reward of being less a victim of offensive pressure.
Thanks for the complement! Appreciate it a lot, character designs are a big point of stress for me.
That's a good way of thinking about game design for sure, it's an area I have a lot of strong ideas about so I'll be sure to talk about things from that perspective in the future.
You've inspired me to look at Yo-kai watch. It's a series I've just never had any meaningful contact with.
I'm gonna check out your content, thanks again!
@@howard_blast Thanks! Happy to know you were willing to hear me out!
started wondering what a MissingNo. reference/equivalent would do in a game where the characters are cute girls
Kino idea...
Sephiroth
I always really liked how crits were tied to Speed. As for why: if your ATK is 1 or 100 higher than your opponent makes a big difference, if your DEF is 1 or 100 higher than your opponent makes a big difference, but if your Speed is 1 or 100 higher? 0 difference, nothing at all, just a bunch of wasted points. Though rather than going by base Speed, it should of course go by actual Speed.
Of course, crit rates were way too high for high-Speed Pokemon (especially with taking high-crit moves to 100%), but there's a very interesting theory about the Focus Energy bug: supposedly, crit rates are swapped altogether. Focus Energy crit rate is supposed to be the normal crit rate, while the normal crit rate is supposed to be the Focus Energy crit rate. And that theory seems to check out: depending on the Pokemon's Speed you get to values that are quite similar to gen 2+ values.
Big agree.
That's wild also, because when they made Stadium they reworked crit rates to make them a little more reasonable (bit lower for fast pokemon, bit higher for slow pokemon iirc) and fixed focus energy. So they devs on Stadium just embraced what they ended up with before Gen 2 gave us the crit philosophy we have now.
I didn't get into in this vid, but the speed system I'm making is going to differ from Pokemon's in a number of ways, and one of those will involve trying to fix the way in which speed points are wasted in that way (although not through determining default crit rate ofc).
@_Vengeance_ speed is the most important stat in every generation of pokemon but okay, I guess you're coming at this from a purely casual perspective not a competitive one, and in that context it does make sense.
@@calebmon Yeah, that's the problem here. Even in regular play, speed is already a very vital component. Determining crit rates is way too OP.
@gustavolopes5094 yeah that's my point? What was the point of your comment exactly? Pointing out what I already said?
@@calebmon ... I was agreeing with you and expanding on the reasons why, and disagreeing with you about it making sense in a purely casual context. Why all the animosity?
this is awesome. great job analyzing RBY OU meta and mechanics. I really wish you luck trying to bring the gameplay into the modern day with your game!
Thank you!
Just found this channel today and the way you interpret game design is so fascinating and insightful to me, you managed to put into words something I've struggled to describe for a while, how I enjoy the stories told by balance and drama in gameplay quite often more than a game's proper "plot."
The barrier system of this game intrigues me the most out of everything you've talked about in these dev logs, and has me dying to try out the combat! I'm wondering how you plan on handling access to barriers, if they'll all be available to the player from the start or unlocked in the first few chapters, or something else, that could have a huge affect on the balance and team building aspects of the game.
I also think it may be fun if barriers could be swapped around between party members like a job system of sorts, allowing for experimentation with different 3-barrier loadout combos. You don't have to answer these questions necessarily, part of me does want to retain some mystery around this project until it's available to play. Mostly just commenting to share my first impressions. Love this idea, best of luck with development brother!
Thanks you!!
I'm definitely strongly playing around with the idea of unlocking some equipable barriers through various means. I can think of several narrative justifications and fun ways to integrate it.
Would potentially add a lot to a playthrough to have a handful of optionally unlockable ones.
Swapping barriers I didn't think about but definitely, now giving some thought, could potentially be really interesting.
In the Tauros vs Executor scenario, the drama is only apparent to us, because we're familiar with the game mechanics and can see the possible outcomes. A new player doesn't even know Executor's moveset or if they need a crit to kill. There's no drama if the player doesn't know what's happening. I hope your game provides the player the information they need to appreciate the story of the battles.
Also, most players aren't rational when it comes to probability. They expect good luck for themselves, and interpret bad luck uncharitably. During a playthrough, a 1/256 miss will be perceived as a net negative by players, even when it factually wasn't, because they will remember their own misses more strongly than their opponent's. I would caution against attaching raw, unmitigable RNG to something as volatile as missing an entire turn.
Competitive players are rational about the probabilities though, they've been in that situation many times and have weighed the odds, and will make their decision based on a reading of the current game state.
@@calebmon Even competitive players get salty over RNG, and they're a very small number of people.
@nicholaschan4481 sure but the drama of which choice to make is there for them and they must weigh the odds in their minds and go through it so your point about the drama not being apparent isn't true with them
I agree communication with the player and tinkering with values to make them feel best is super important. Possibly overriding the rules of the game in certain contexts (eg. certain spells or conditions) to improve game feel as well is something important to always consdier.
I'll show plenty of examples of how I'm going to communicate with the player in future videos, and I'll get feedback as people play demos I release.
As a developer of rpgs myself I agree with your views on game balance. It is used to facilitate drama
based 🥂
best of luck with your own development
really like that art style, you got me interested in that game of yours even if I disagree a lot with lots of things you said about gen 1
if I have time, I want to try this demo you mention
gen 5 still the best tho
Fair, cuz Gen 5 is epic.
Thank you! Stay tuned.
Honestly this video really struck a cord with me in my own journey of taking pokemon and building it to my liking.
One thing that I feel like was grazed by the video do miss is Normal types feeling like legitimate threats in their own right, not just as wastebaskets but the ones with powerful options to use with their Same Type Attack Boost pretty much making most of the types half of a super effective hit. But nowadays its pretty much obsolete when all of the types have the same powerhouse moves now. A Body Slam from a Tauros loses its luster when Arcanine can do a Fire type Double-Edge that can take away almost 3/4ths of the Exeggutors health in one hit (barring critical hits). Which lets the Arcanine user just win in the team builder without any in-battle drama whatsoever.
Game Freak's solution to this problem was to give normal types a movepool so deep and yet it doesn't matter because you can only pick four moves and you don't get STAB on them. Which leads to that movepool bloat that just leaves the mon almost identityless. Which just leads me to the question, why be a jack of all trades when you have 6 Pokemon in a team?
On the other hand, the 1/256 glitch being a mechanic while leading to drama is only going to lead to frustration to a casual audience because they don't want to see a story play out, they want to optimize the fun out and win the challenge. I feel like making it more obvious by letting every 100% accurate move be dropped down to be 99% accurate would work because it bluntly communicates that there is still inherent risk.
That being said, I love how you can take lessons from a game many that is seen as archaic and "a buggy disaster" and see the diamonds in the rough that is this nearly 30 year old passion project. Its commendable and makes me think to study more games that are seen to "not age that well" and go down to their level. I'd love to see more of this, but for now I think I have a devlog to binge now, thank you Howard, you've earned a new subscriber.
That's such a great point about move pools there, I wish it occurred to me to mention that, it's something I've thought exactly the same way about.
You're definitely right about the 99% thing. An implementation along those lines could be the much better option. I have some ideas I'm playing around with I'll report on soon.
And yes, I absolutely think people sleep on many elements found in old game design way too often, I'll have a lot more to say in the future on the topic.
Thanks!!
Great video! I finally get why gen3+ games just don't hit the same for me. As a casual player who doesn't want to min max, memorize a spreadsheet of abilities, or look up optimal strategies, the abilities introduced in gen3 just felt like ass pulls to me. The battles no longer had a reasonable tension to them with easily readable opponents, but felt like random bullshit.
I think the biggest "what" of the G1 game design is Moltres.
There is this unspoken rule of that Gym Leader TMs are not available via level-up (with exception of Pikachu in Yellow), so of course Moltres does not get Fire Blast like how Articuno and Zapdos get Blizzard and Thunder... but Leer? Really??? You could have given it Flamethrower.
Oh yeah also some moves are hilariously undertuned. What were they smoking with 50BP 65% accurate Rock Throw???
-oh yeah also don't think you can sneak in The Primal Scene That Girl Saw past me-
It is very funny how Moltres needs a tm for fire blast and doesnt level into flamethrower. As for some very move designs, I definitely wanna talk about some in the future. I've been modding some stuff and one fun thing I added was disable letting you see your opponent's moves and pick one. I started on a metronome redesign where you can select the type upon use which should be really fun.
I somehow missed your first dev log video, so I didn't know about Orkastle until now.
I joined the patreon and I'm looking forward to playing it.
Holy based. 🥂
More coming soon.
I think the excitement of these gen 1 types of battles is only truly possible when all Pokemon are the same level because over leveling makes the fights trivial, and when type advantage doesn't guarantee an easy victory just because someone had studied the player's guide beforehand. So I like that you said your game will have no xp gain to solve the first problem, and it seems like you're leaning much more toward status affects and buffing your character to win instead of just winning a rock paper scissors match like in Pokemon. And I agree with you, gen 1 was not meant to be a prototype, Game Freak didn't know if the game would even sell at the time! It seems Game Freak really wanted to have rng reign supreme in gen 1 no matter what strategies the player came up with to win, which can either make the game incredibly exciting or incredibly frustrating. It seems like Game Freak changed a lot of the battling mechanics in the later gens to have rng play less of a role in determining who wins. I agree this can make the battles feel less like a ridiculous anime-like fight, but in turn it does make the player feel like they can win based more on their smarts and not just luck. I feel like the perfect rpg can balance both skill and luck well, so as to give the player an exciting time while also allowing them to learn how to outsmart said luck to win in spite of it.
Yeah, all very true.
That's why I want to try and do everything I can to prevent stuff that legitimately feels frustratingly random. It'll be a bit of an iterative process and might involve changing things as I go, but I'm going to make sure there's no lazy changes eg. just nerfing something too strong without thinking about the intended design.
I get what you are saying. Despite its flaws, gen 1 had some unique mechanics and did a decent job differentiating each Pokémon.
Absolute gemmy vid bro but my heart will always be with gen 3.
I respect it, def my second pick. I keep up with Jimothy a bit so I'll be noting things from its design too as I go.🥂
@@howard_blast btw what's your rationale for the more "stiff" side-on pose for Reiya's battle sprite rather than a more martial stance? Great work on the battle effects!
You can't just say "perchance"
Mario if he real.
I've noticed whenever a game does something good unintentionally, it rarely gets carried over to the sequel due the devs never learning why what they did was good. They usually end up "fixing" their "mistake". Gunz the duel is a great example. It unintentionally had a lot of animation cancels which lead to crazy high, carpal-tunnel inducing, skill ceiling that garnered competitive interest in a game that otherwise would've been meh. Then they made gunz 2 which "fixed" this (probably trying to not scare away casuals) but from what I heard it was kinda meh.
Honestly, the dynamics caused by the single special stat is part of why I still go back and play gen1 (actually just did after watching this video the first time, love the new thumbnail btw). Though I do wish there was a bit more variety to the moveset. I get teaching body slam, earthquake, thunderbolt, blizzard to the all-around normal type tauros, but does the poison/ground nidoking need to have the same best moves? I'll give gen1 credit for the mons having a unique identity despite the limited move pool, but wish it was a bit more expanded (but not as bloated as modern gens)
That's part of why I like gen3. Also, while it has the split sp atk/def, moves are still physical/special based on type. Meaning that these different archetypes excel at different type coverage, which imo gives the types a stronger identity and can have trade-offs that need to be considered in team building.
The real reason I play gen3 more (and pokemon in general) is it has repeatable endgame. After putting so many hours to my save file, I don't really want to reset it just to play again with a different build, and sometimes only slightly different. And usually when I get to the end of an rpg, I see so many ways my team can still be improved, but there's no way for the game to even acknowledge any continuous improvement. The battle frontier's win streak system isn't perfect. Since the difficult stops increasing past a point it's just "how long do you want to grind until you hit bad rng?" If the series of battles increased in difficultly forever, that would be better. Other ways could be like hades' heat system, counting the "cycles" to beat a boss like hsr, or just set some +X% power increase on the boss where the highest +X% you can beat is your score.
I bring that last point up because I hope you consider adding to Orkastle some form of repeatable end game with a performance metric. The "performance metric" being the important part as it encourages deeply mastering the games mechanics, while offering a another way to compare your performance to other players outside of a multiplayer vs mode that might be dead after a period of time (think arcade players who master every mechanic for a higher score). There's so many rpgs that have interesting mechanics to explore and master (even ones that focus more on story) but there's no way to do that. The story was wrapped up nicely, but it feels like to game is left without a conclusion.
Super interesting, I didn't know about the Gunz case.
And yeah that's such a big thing I find, and one of the many reasons I can often find the first entry in game series to be my favorites.
It's very easy in the medium of games for refinement or intention to refine to actual delete appeal or features.
Gen 3 for sure hits a great balance with what you're describing, and I often think of it as the point before the series starting toppling on its own weight, gameplay-wise. It was always a point where I felt overall very satisfied with the series even if it didn't go the direction I initially wanted.
In my own game, I absolutely want to avoid that excessive best move overlap seen in Gen 1 you're describing, cuz it definitely can get awkward lol.
And yeah as for the type of replayability you're describing, absolutely will be something I'm going to stress about, so it's nice to hear what kinds of aspects of that appeal to people. It's something I've always personally valued, I'm the type to go back to favorites all the time, and in current year Steam happens to really reward replayability in games, sales algorithm-wise.
Little bits of setbacks (eg. got a terrible flu), but updates soon!
Thunder and Ice, starting magic spells... Hmmm... I know it's probably not it, but I always think of Squall from Final Fantasy 8 because his two starting summons are ice and thunder.
Close, I was thinking of Cloud, but I never noticed that with Squall until now, lol, wonder if that was intentional on their part.
nice to see a gameplay update and smart idea of cross-promotion by plugging into the poketube audience.
also, fun use of the rewrite ost and yugioh fm battle music (i like how the latter coincides with getting more into the battle mechanics).
🥂
I'll mostly be rolling with this format for a while because it's a lot more fun for me and probably viewers as well than straightforward follow-up 'logs.
Some vids periodically will just be me monologuing over Orkastle footage when there's a bunch of new game stuff to show off at once (vid after next will be like that).
Your character art is cute and expressive, I like it! Your take in Gen1 mechanics is interestingly unique too. What are your thoughts on an equivalent of badge boosts and the badge boost glitch?
Thank you!
I honestly never gave too much thought to badge boosts and the glitch, since it's not in stadium or multiplayer where you're really inclined to notice things like that more, but I do love the stat reapplication glitch, and have been brainstorming equivalents that make sense. In general, I really love the way the mechanic interlocks things and turns adds contextual strategy to lots of scenarios, similar to the way I enjoy Special being one stat. More is happening in one motion.
Hey, I didn't finish watching the video yet, but when you said "a Tauros set that seeks to tank hits" I think you would like a format called Nintendo Cup 1997, I'd love to tell you more about it, but some of the best players use a Tauros set consisting of Bodyslam/Doubleteam/Rest/Substitute (Or Blizzard or Hyperbeam) Blizzard had a 30% chance to freeze.
Yeah lol! I am actually aware of the format where they didn't have evasion clause. It was a mess! lol
I watched the matches
i think you were touching upon this somewhat, but something i really love about gen 1 is how it's designed first and foremost as a single player experience, with the multiplayer elements existing moreso as a way of socializing with other players than for the sake of high level competition. your mention of asymmetrical types in gen 1 definitely folds into this well. i feel like newer generations tend to try and balance everything too much, to the point that individual types begin to lose their identity. i appreciate how gen 1 instead focuses on how each element contributes to an exciting and varied experience across a playthrough, with a lot of individual pokemon fitting fairly cleanly into traditional archetypes, such as how you mention tauros acts much like a traditional jrpg protag. i definitely think gen 1 has issues when it comes to actual competitive play, seeing the same three pokemon in every match with a lot of stuff that feels like nonsense when it's used against you isn't going to make for a very engaging competitive scene in my eyes, but again i figure that the primary purpose of multiplayer elements in gen 1 was never to create a complex metagame, it was so little jimmy and his buddies on the playground could show off what they have and engage in low level, casual competition.
Big agree, yeah.
I love Gen 1 competitive, but I'd never champion the metagame as some competitive masterpiece. My goal with my own game isn't to create the "best competitive experience" either for a pvp mode, but I do want to make something that people at least have a hard time fault-finding with, while pursuing everything I love about Gen 1 and its pvp meta.
based and otaku.
lfg
I really like what you're taking from gen 1, one thing you may want to take from gen 3 is how the AI tries to fight the player for tempo since you mentioned wanting a nuanced AI system
interesting, i'm not sure if i'm completely sold on your vision yet but i'll definitely check out the demo when it drops (also that side shot of reiya is so good 😭😭😭), what's with the imperial flag in your banner though? doesn't that have kinda bad connotations?
Thanks! 🥂
I got set back a little from the worst flu of my life, but update really soon.
As for the flag, it's just a character from Index who's cool and doubles a little as an inside joke going back years when some friends would bust on me for being a high tier weeb.
It'll get replaced with something related to my game/channel more directly very soon.
is there a playable demo if no when can we expect it?
I played Yellow as a kid, but I based my own game on the systems from gen VI onward (albeit, with many alterations), because that's when I returned to the game. I hadn't really considered the benefits of having a single special stat.
Interesting, can I find info on this game?
What's the best way to play Pokemon Red and Blue? Just emulating the original release?
Yeah, I think emulators can even emulate the connector pack to Stadium on N64 emulators.
I know phone emulators have straight up emulated the link cable features which is pretty cool.
For any interesting gameplay challenges, you have to play Stadium (Japanese 1 and Japanese 2, or just American 1 (which was Japanese 2, kind of confusing)). Or just Showdown in browser.
99.99% of what they are talking about in the video really only applies to competitive gen 1 which you can play on pokemon Showdown, in the actual game you just click your strongest move with your strongest pokemon and instantly one shot everything for the whole playthrough just like every other pokemon. The tension between whether to switch out tauros or risk the sleep, whether to click Hyper beam or body slam, whether Tauros misses or not, whether the sleep powder misses or not, all that truly wonderful stuff is felt by the player immensely in competitive gen 1, and it is the generation that does that stuff constantly, it is a roller coaster ride of a meta, and would def recommend it. This video is 100% correct about how gen 1 feels to play competitively. As for actual single player gameplay though, you can def do better in the pokemon series.
Don’t think you used that dot hack ost unnoticed
🥂
i stopped my immersion for this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If I might suggest one thing about giving feedback to the player : Even if it is technically a chance to miss, better phrase it as the opponent evading the attack. That way the player gets less frustrated by his character's "incompetence" making him/her miss a turn, the blame is instead on the opponent and the player will be less tempted to rant on about game balance being broken or whatever ;)
Also Reiya best gal, meganekko FTW !
Really cool video.
Finally someone else says it. I've been on this train for a while now
🥂
@howard_blast wanted to follow up, but you can go in a very similar direction with TMs and map design.
TMs were a specifically placed one time use power bump. Its the equivalent of giving one mon a training arc in a story. It gives variability on who you give it to, but it helps mold one characters immediate and future growth.
Making tms reuse is tragic. Making most tms buy able early is also tragic. They work best as well place single use items with an early purchasable subset. Maybe provide different subsets by city or a late game mega store.
Map design is similar. Tm place ment, alternate routes, longer dungeon routes as gates to new zones, mon type availability, gen2 swarm events, etc. There is a lot to say, but the way I would think about it is zones with dungeons or keys to move between allows open exploration but limited character and story access. Slap on special or hidden events to get a character early or a hidden character.
Anyways Gen 1 and 2, have a clear different direction than the rest and it's a community bias parading as game desion fact to think the newer direction is just universally better
I feel like you won't add this, because of your opinion on hidden power and more obtuse mechanics, but I'll ask anyway. Will your game have something close to gen 1 counter? That move is really unintuitive but it's also one of the coolest skill shots I've ever seen in a turn based RPG. Correctly guessing if your opponent will switch out and countering his previous damage onto his next mon, trying to store your own damage and then baiting your enemy into switching by using a mon with predictable counterplay or the ability of your own status moves not cancelling your possibility of being able to counter
I didn't talk about it cuz it didn't fit with this vid and I still have some cooking to do, but short answer,
Yes, absolutely there will be something similar to counter. Multiple versions actually. I absolutely love Gen 1 counter despite the fact that it's weird.
Since I'm making a game about magicians, it definitely won't be hard to make these counter moves makes proper sense from a flavor/lore standpoint.
When the Chancey dedicated video comes out, I'll talk all about this.
Thanks for asking!
Why is biting a ghost super effective? I liked it better when bite was a normal type move. I can understand retroactively making Magenmite a steel type or karate chop becoming a fighting type move but making bite a dark type move always bothered me, it would only really make sense if ghost types were immune to all physical moves instead of normal and fighting type but this probably didnt happen because it would make ghost op. THey could have made Magnemite and Magneton steel type in gen 1 dragon and ghost only had mons from one evolutionary line so it could have been done but they probably didn't want a Pokemon to have a type that there were no moves for. Zubat and Golbat could arguably be dark types instead of poison since they are nocturnal darkness dwelling bats and leech life a blood sucking move seems more dark than bug. Arguably Psyduck and Golduck should be dual water psychic types there's a lot of what ifs to ponder if we start questioning types and mechanics. What if ghost types were immune to psychic types pokemon. In game dialogue with npcs in red and blue suggest ghost types are supposed to check psychic types but the only ghosts are also part poison and ghost has no damaging moves or immunity to psychic what if ghosts were immune to psychic though. Interestingly in yellow some npc dialogue was changed to remove the references to ghost beating psychic types.
All good food for thought!
And yeah, funny you mention, but Dark/あく type i definitely always felt a lot of aesthetic dissonance with. I think the concept is cool but aspects really bother me.
Nice! .hack music~ :9
Would love to hear your perspective on the mechanical feel of a game like Pokemon Yellow Legacy
I'd definitely like to try it, could make a good stream.
Aren't you worried about the loss in engagement that randomness gives in a single player game?
In a competitive real world scenario like pokemon, the thrill is given by betting against a live human being who's going to react to your gamble working out or blowing up in your face, but don't players in a single player experience tend to see randomness as a simple hindrance? (think people's opinions on Morrowind/Oblivion mechanics and "misses").
Morrowind misses are huge issues because they make no sense. Visually, the attack is connected. Misses don't add drama in Morrowind either since they just provide a brief moment of wasted motion before you do the exact same attack again.
As for a single player experience that exploded recently BECAUSE of randomness, there's Balatro.
Forbidden Memories has remained a classic, loved for its RNG gauntlet as well.
The key to making the player interested in RNG and "unfairness" is going to be the narrative, which I'll be sure to show people in more depth in future videos. As long as the player feels part of a story they're interested in, and the RNG is an extension of that, they'll accept and enjoy it.
@howard_blast I do think that the decisions AI make will feel a lot more like randomness while playing against a human just feels different, you are trying to predict what another person is going to do in this situation based on previous knowledge of their playstyle, I've yet to play an AI that has felt the same way it does to play against a real person, instead of prediction and mind games it feels more like, is this AI gonna randomly do X or randomly do Y. Or is the AI deterministic in it's attacking patterns and therefore easily manipulated into losing, in either case it just doesn't feel the same way as it does in a real competitive match will, so as a designer you will have to do something interesting to try and get this feel right, not saying it's impossible either, just idk anyone who has done it right before! Good luck though! You're game will be interesting to play regardless.
@@calebmon An AI could cheat some of the time, deciding what it does after you do to create the illusion that it read your mind.
@willmaud2359 right but would that feel fair? Would it feel like it does when a real human reads your move or would it feel like an unfair cheating computer? I've never had a computer feel like it wasn't cheating in such situations. It basically just feels like randomness instead of it actually being able to read you. Unlike a real person doing the samething.
@@calebmon Part of is probably psychological. If you didn't know whether you were playing against a computer or human, you might feel different.
RBY is a fun gen; a lot of love was put into it. I play Red on my phone while waiting in lines.
That said, praising Tauros's abstract access to Blizzard while criticizing later games' switch moves by saying they "don't even make sense" feels disingenuous. Aren't both in service of drama and storytelling within combat, as you've said?
In the Tauros examples, a case that was ignored is that both Mr. T and Eggy could miss their moves. Wouldn't this situation be a huge problem for drama?
These kinds of little double standards and oversights piled up across the video and really soured me on the whole thing. Your art is nice though, you've obviously practiced your lineart and shading a lot. Good luck with your game.
I explained in the video that Tauros specifically feels like a spellcaster, which goes well with his visual design and movepool design and the concept of normal types as a whole.
In the case both miss their moves, the battle simply continues, so it's not an end case, it's just an extender of the current situation.
Thanks for the complement and gl!
I wouldn’t say RBY were the best designed games, a lot of what makes the OU battles fun is accident lol, but I wouldn’t call them bad either…..i definitely didn’t like how so many move types barely exist, and didn’t particularly like how move types were automatically categorized to either be special or physical…..had there been more dragon and bug etc type moves and all move types could be special OR physical, I dare say RBY would’ve been absolutely perfect (aside from Onix and Farfetch’d and a couple others being so blatantly terrible lol, but I digress)
Yeah, I prefer to think about what could have been iterated off RBY as a base. I certainly exaggerate when I say it's without a doubt the best designed, because it's hard to make a complete case for it unto itself, but I 100% beleive it's a superior launching point for game design than any other generations.
That's one of the reasons I'll be making videos about little mods I make. I want to show how my brain perceives the best way to improve these games.
Holy crap lol, you started talking about it the second after you made that statement 😂
i have played gens 1 to 4, and guess which is my most played?
gen 1 of course! why? because i like the simplicity of it!
i actually like the idea of crits being based of of speed, i like the fact that special is a single stat, i like that eevee only has 3 eeveelutions, i like that gens take on the normal type, i like that blizzard has 90% accuracy as opposed to 70, i like the way hyper beam works there
now of course, i got lost in a tangent again... anyway, heres a few suggestions for your game
no1: i think that your random miss chance should be 1%
no2: id double down on this random miss chance, and make regular physical attacks be 95% accurate rather than 99%
now of course, its up to you wether to listen to these suggestions, but even if you dont, i will give one piece of advice: when making something in a game, test out the extremes first, then find a balance between
Based, I like the train of thought of those suggestions, I got other people suggesting things along a similar line, so I definitely have some interesting ideas in mind that I think could make things potentially really fun.
@@howard_blast yeah, also another idea i had came to me right about now.
and that is, instead of having a chance to miss, it is instead a chance to fail the attacks in another way.
mainly that they deal drastically lower damage, and have no hope of delivering a secondary effect.
id call that mechanic a "fumble", the idea doing so could allow you to increase the "fumble" chance even further without increasing player frustration too much.
you would still have your non direct damage eg status moves still miss instead of doing a weaker effect, but lets be real, a fumbled attack is chip damage anyways, right?
I always felt like the only person who liked gen 1 misses because I always thought of them less as "missing" and more as "dodging", as if your character has a slight edge to be able to dodge a move. Which is actually what the modern "friendship" mechanics claim to do. However, I don't like the modern mechanic because it's 1-sided. You're gonna tell me that a gym leader who has been a leader longer than I've been a trainer doesn't have maxed out friendship with their Pokemon?
Granted, for a competitive multi-player game, I totally get this missing/dodging mechanic being removed, as competitive games need some level of guarantees and can make more rewarding outcomes riskier, which accuracy already does on its own. But for single player, I think a dodging system is a great idea and I'd even double down on it, increasing the dodge rate by 1/256 for every stat point you have buffed, and decreasing it by 1/256 for every stat you have debuffed. And maybe double that for speed stat changes. Cap that at 12/256 increase so with the 1/256 innate chance you have up to a roughly 5% chance to dodge, and maybe do another 6 or 7/256 decrease in dodging for having status conditions or increase in dodging if your opponent has a status, and you've got roughly 7.5% chance of evasion possible without touching the evasion stat. With this kind of change, I may even remove evasion affecting moves, though I think I'd keep accuracy affecting moves. Buffing or debuffing accuracy can be a powerful tool to overcome your own weaknesses or magnify your opponents weaknesses, but I think evasion boosting is somewhat double dipping and perhaps too much with this system. I like the idea of evasion continuing to be somewhat unreliable and difficult, but plain missing because you're kneecapped or doing something difficult to be somewhat. Like, thinking of a real fight, whether I'm in the zone or not, dodging a quick jab is gonna be really difficult, and blocking, catching, or totally evading a highly telegraphed kick is gonna be relatively easy. But getting in the zone will help me see through my opponent's guard or even how they're going to move after a block so I can more easily land my next hit. It naturally helps more with offense than defense, in my experience and from the people I've talked to (though, it can help a decently with blocking, but usually not to the same degree as striking). I think reflecting this in game, with slight chances of dodging for buffs could be really cool. Not sure if I'd apply those buffs to accuracy in any way, but it may be interesting, if you totally buff yourself like crazy, for Hyper Beam to go from 90 accuracy to 100 cause of all of your buffs, thus removing the need for accuracy modifiers too. But that may be too broken. I am liking the idea of playing with this though. Might be worth testing out.
The single special stat is also an interesting idea I think I get what they were going for, but even having atk1 atk2, def1, def2 can lead to some interesting balance, like how a lot of fighting types can't strike specially well, but are highly capable special defenders, while only being okay physical defenders. They both have their own nuances that can lead to unique play. I don't think the single special attack ever really was too much of a problem for skillful special users, but more so an issue for one's like fighting types who had awful special and thus could never really bulk through special moves without becoming special monsters, unless you just wanted to take a Chansey approach with them and give them insane HP with low special and defense (though I know Chansey had great special in gen 1, I'm just making an example of how high HP would need to start to get to offset lower mixed defenses to simulate the defensive layout you really might want to have without overpowering offensive potential). In the end, I get why they made the decision to split the special stat, and I get why you like it. It's one of the things that keeps me coming back to gen 1. I also love how the critical hit system worked, with so many ways to guarantee crits, and speed helping with that, but also that they were capped by ignoring all stat changes, including your own. I get why this was changed in future generations too, but I do particularly like this because it makes for such interesting flavor for the Pokemon with higher speed stats, and offers a benefit of better being able to capitalize off buffs for slower Pokemon. Now if gen 1 just got bulk up back ported to it to be a slightly weaker physical amnesia. Maybe nerf amnesia to 1 stat point boosting too, since 2 stages in offensive and defensive stats in a single turn is kinda insane. Or buff the back ported bulk up to also do 2 stages, cause sometimes the crazy stuff is really fun
That's a great point. It really does feel the miracle dodge when you get that miss.
I'm liking all these accuracy ideas you're throwing out. I actually already had plans following a similar vector that I was gonna test out a decent bit before talking about. I'm def gonna reference the ideas here for some inspiration.
And yeah, you're completely right that I kind of conveniently skipped over the limitations of special being locked into one stat lol. What I didn't mention is how I actually like a lot of those limitations even though it screws over certain types of mons hard, but the nice thing about making your own game is you can always just add in some kind of work around for balance, any type of mechanic is on the table.
Bulk up or a super bulk up in Gen One could have been super interesting, didn't think of that.
I periodically mod Red and Blue in little ways (I plan on making some vids about this) using the really nice disassembly, so that could be a fun thing to do different implementations of.
Thanks for the great comment!! Helps a lot.
@@howard_blast yeah, happy to help. Actually, I'd love to get into modding myself, but I have no idea how to start with the disassemblies. I forked them onto my github, but don't really know how to get them set up to start working with them 😅 do you have any programs you like to work with to edit and reassemble the disassemblies?
I'm okay at programming but I'm just so bad about sorting through which environments to use and getting set up. I don't know why. If I don't follow specific guides on getting set up, I often just struggle through endless non-computing errors in my brain with this sort of stuff really frequently, no clue why, and it's really frustrating. Like I've already done all this analysis, but I haven't been able to get set up in the environment to test these ideas and plans that I've come up with
this is a good analysis. I hope this isn't a bad spot for the criticism on your game's concept art. I don't know if you're the artist or had someone else do it or what the situation for that is, but I see some problems that I believe would lead to unnituitiveness regarding the gameplay.
I noticed with the game you're talking about, it's really hard to tell what roles in the party your characters are meant to fulfill based on their designs, which messes with the intuitiveness. Looking at Kannyo, Yuriel, and Reiya. Kannyo looks like a squishy healer/mage, Yuriel looks like a frail physical attacker with utility spells, and Reiya looks like a magical glass cannon. So, seeing their intended roles makes me go "what?" It's bad for players who tend to feel things out instead of looking at the numbers, I think. Like, the Gen 1 Pokemon designs of Tauros, Chansey, & Snorlax all convey what they're supposed to be. Tauros is a muscular bull, which screams fast physical attacker with some bulk; Snorlax is a fat fucking bear, which says slow & bulky but hints at the capacity for damage; and Chansey is a fat orb with almost entirely round shapes, heavily pointing towards a supportive tank character. If I were to suggest edits on the characters, I'd recommend making changes to their body types.
Reiya would definitely look more like a physical attacker if she had visible muscles. She can still be small and slim; those traits imply that she's fast but frail; but she needs something in her design to imply that she's physically geared instead of magically geared. If your game has a weapon system, this distinction could be somewhat moot since having her clearly wielding a weapon might help. I think I see a knife in her back pocket? That should be more prominent in her official art I think, since it emphasizes that she uses weapons. I think the way her shoes & leggings look works perfectly fine.The large shoes help emphasize speed & the lightweight outfit also does that. Depending on how much you want to exaggurate proportions, you could make her legs larger proportional to her body to further emphasize her speed. I'm not really sure what "brave" magic is intended to mean, like, I assume it's an element, no clue on what aesthetic you're giving it. But her current design reads as "electric" to me. It's because she has the most modern-like fashion out of the three. While all three characters have a similar pallet, Reiya's outfit sort of looks like it has neon highlights, which leans almost into a scifi-like aesthetic. She has very modern looking shoes too and her short & unruly hair also reads as a modern style. I think her outfit may need some sort of rework? I'm not sure entirely what your game's aesthetic is meant to be, just that everyone else's design looks like it's trying to lean somewhat towards standard fantasy while her design leans more scifi.
Yuriel's design for the most part is fine. Without overhauling the aesthetic, there's not much I can think of to sell the point of mixed attacker better, but I will say that she does not read as a bulky character. She reads as a fast but frail one. Some of the traits leaning into that are her physical frame being small, you might want to make her slightly wider to imply that she can take a hit or two. Perhaps giving her a more top-heavy silhouette may help lean into the idea that she's got weight to throw around? Her scarf also implies that she's built for speed. Scarves evoke the idea of fast and frail. I think if the scarf was replaced with a cape, that would probably work better without messing with her design too much. Capes are more associated as an accessory for armored knights. I also think she should have some light armor in her outfit. Right now it looks like any attack would just tear through her clothing. She looks like she might be going for a white knight aesthetic? That could be worth potentially leaning into? The main issue with her design really is just that she looks way too frail for my mind to associate with "bulky mixed attacker." Yuriel's main magic type being evil does not read through her design at all. I'm assuming this is meant to be intentional. Right now her main element looks like either light or wind. Light because of her being the only of the three characters with white clothing, and wind because of the light-weight appearance and scarf. I think her design should have some hint at her using evil magic. I'd personally mess with her eye color. My first thought is red eyes. But you could also try obsidian eyes, violet eyes, some lore-relevant eye color, what-have-you. You could even give her eyes a slight gradient or have some weird shading with the highlights. But I do think her relationship with evil magic should be more present in her design. If I were to guess based on the attire she wants to reject her magic. And that can be leaned into. If she's rejecting her magic, is that meant to imply she's rejecting a core part of herself? If so, something should feel off about her design. Is it a situation where she's weaponizing evil magic to fight evil? Then her design should probably signify her main element.
Kannyo is the worst offender of the three. While Reiya's design clearly communicates "fast" and Yuriel's design communicates "attacker," Kannyo's design just doesn't look like a wall. Her design communicates that she's not meant to be a damage dealer due to her having a nun-like aesthetic. Which led me to think either "some sort of healing magic user, either holy or water or something like that." I like the pouch in her outfit. It gets across the idea that she's well-prepared for the non-stabby parts of battle. I think the design should lean a lot more into her being bottom-heavy since that implies that she's stable and immovable. I think she should also be much more wide as fatter characters are often associated with tankiness. I think something should be done to make her outfit look more armored. I do like the current outfit. The cloth looks thick and insulated, which is good, but it's too subtle of a hint towards her tankiness in my opinion.
I don't really draw anime girls, but I kinda want to make some sketches to better illustrate what I mean.
I think the key factor here is seeing them in the context of the story. The thing with anime character designs is that they're built to put emphasis on their differences from each other rather than express themselves so directly in a vacuum. It's the type of thing that supposed to click when you see them in action but isn't instantly necessarily instantly communicated.
Princess Connect does a really good job of this. Miyako for example certainly doesn't look like a wall at first glance, but when you get a feel for her stubborn personality, the fact that she's a ghost, and her ability to summon giant puddings, being an unkillable fighter starts to make a lot of sense.
Kannyo is absolutely going to have an emphasis on healing and holy spells, but I also want her to be really hard to break through.
Magic is really important here. It's important to emphasize the magic is dominant in determining how these characters function. When they express their personalities and how that affects what magic they use, it should all fall into place.
That being said, there are some intended variations in body type expression, but they're more subtle. Some of it gets a little lost in pixels sometimes, but with enough full res art of the characters done, you'll eventually notice that Reiya is a bit leaner, while Kannyo is a bit softer, stuff like that. This is typically how anime illustrators handle most characters, they first focus on expressing characters through relative rather than obvious differences, altho focusing on obvious differences does happen too sometimes ofc.
Thanks for the detailed feedback though, I'll definitely keep all this in mind.
0:38 games of who???
🐔🐔
I recognise the music at 7:40 , subbed
Lfg
But to play devil's advocate on your first point.
We could also just remove Defense and have HP be the only defensive stat.
A game could certainly work that way, and that could be an interesting implementation, but it would be a more limited system effectively making all physical hits inherently stronger attacks (without types taken into account) per attack point than special attacks.
For Pokemon, this would demand a physical wall like Rhydon have an obscene HP stat, and his special stat would have to be reduced to basically nothing to make sure he's not specially bulky.
But it could work, a game designed around this would just have to be careful about how the physical attacks it distributes are and how hard it is to boost your attack power in battle.
Ah but what if, like special, your attack was no longer an attack stat only, but both attack and defense, call it idk strength stat. Then it would be like having a gen 1 special stat in both physical and special attacking types. I think this could work in a simplier game.
7:53 stealth rocks only stab into pokemon that move drastically, ie coming out of a pokeball, that's why they activate on switch
they have the same amount of power because... the pokemon isnt putting their physical or mental strength into it? its just like throwing some sharp magic rocks out and then letting them do their thing.
i agree that the originals are fun and interesting in their own way, but this REALLY isnt to say that that more recent games aren't. you can't rant about every little flaw the newer games have, while ignoring all those present in the originals. i DO agree that more recent games suffer from powercreep to a kind of silly extent though, urshifu and maybe also fluttermane especially. this is an issue that needs to be fixed, but it alone does not completely devalue every single generation after one.
11:40 also i totally disagree with the idea that normal type has become "bland type", i'd say it's more "animal" or "beast" type most of the time
I respect the opinion of power fantasy over balance, but i feel like you play up how intuitive some of the gen 1 mons were because its your favorite. There is nothing intuitive about the bull spamming blizzards lmao.
Also respectfully, players tend to disproportionately remember when the RNG was not in their favor. I've had someone take 2 mons in a row to full paraflinch togekiss, then say "Hax" when i crit them. A chance of missing no matter how small, or i guess ESPECIALLY when its really small will feel awful when it does happen for most players. I agree that it adds to the storyline of a battle, but gotta be a lil careful with some of those
Interesting take in the games, they're a goldmine for learn to make RPGs.
The absolute 1-2 combo of checking out a defense case of Gen 1's mechanics but it turns out to be a disguised ad for a guy's underaged loli waifu JRPG. I don't know what I expected.
I like all the pokemon games I think Gen 3-5 was probably the best battle system
I like them too for different reasons.
@@howard_blast I still think Gen 1 has good design though :)
at 5:26 it seems like you're saying a low chance thing happening randomly is an "asspull" but then you praise the 1/256 chance thing as "special". i don't get it
A situation where there's 1 singular outcome that feels as if it should be the outcome (ie. is by far most likely) is where the lower probability outcome feels asspully. No one is going to prepare a defense for something that only happens 1 in 10 times, for example.
But, if you have a scenario where both outcomes are likely enough to have to be prepared for, you can easily throw in a 3rd very rare scenario without it feeling cheap, because players are not mentally locked in to only treating a single scenario as fair.
@@howard_blast ohhh good player psychology there, nice nice
invite expired
My bad, replaced!
Great video. As of scarlet and violet, the gen 1 games are still my favorites of the franchise but I could never fully articulate why. But I think you did a good job in at least beginning to explain why that is here.
Thank you! I'll have plenty more to say, wanna talk a lot more about all various aspects cuz I've been thinking a lot about it lately.
Finally!
While I prefer splitting Special into SP.Attack and SP.Def, I would keepi Gen 1 Pokemon Special stats close to themselves.
However what I really miss from Gen 1 are: Speed based critical hit ratio (probably I would base it on current speed and probably rebalance multiplier a bit (so Venusaur wouldn't always crit with Razor Leaf) and 1/256 glitch which (until I leanrt that it was a bug) I always considered „Critical failure” (akin rolling a 1 in DnD), Probably that „critical miss” would need a bit of rebalancing (maybe even basing it on one of stats, speed maybe?).
True yeah, I'm playing around with some ideas, def good food for thought.
The gen1 miss is not a bug, it's intended, and even was used in gen1 stadiums, just even rarer
I heard they ran the check twice in stadium so it amount to 1/256 times 1/256 ie. 1/65536, which is pretty funny, and definitely makes it feel like they didn't actually want it, but that's really cool if it was in fact intended!
That's not how a game of chicken works, lol. Jfc
One can switch and gain big potentially big advantage (or punishment) from doing so, but staying in long enough can also yield big advantage (or punishment), which is absolutely close enough to a game of chicken to compare it.
Does this guy think Tauros and Snorlax being OP in OU were PURPOSEFUL decisions lmao
Other than calling emergent gameplay "design decisions," this is mostly a fine video.
Edit: I am sorry, I watched more than a few minutes into the video and realized this is either satire or the worst possible defense of a reasonable conclusion. Gen 2+ is bad because... leftovers make for bad flavor (or "drama" - which doesn't even make sense if you've ever seen a Skarmory heal itself from >10% to full) and the absence of random misses isn't "intuitive"?
Man, if you're deep in the competitive rabbit hole, leftover munching might feel fine to you, but I can promise you my pokeballs that the average player does not enjoy something as unintuitive and frankly not satisfying like that.
As for Tauros and Snorlax being OP, a solid 60% at least of that was by design. The devs didn't predict the meta, but the stats and movepools of mons in Gen 1 are so blatantly done with strong intent if you actually look at the full dex and how bold the mons contrast each other in their stats and movepools.
I forgot to mention, look at the mons used by your rival in the final battle. Of the mons he uses, 4 of them (Alakazam, Eggy, and Rhydon, and Gyarados) are OU viable. Pidgeot is there to characterize the rival as having a sense of attachment to the first pokemon he encountered outside his hometown, and the last one other than Arcanine is just the starter mon. Arcanine is there to fit the fire slot if there's no 'Zard, and is the only one that is clearly worse than devs intended, mostly by virtue of Fire type as a whole being undertuned in RBY.
'Lax was simply always intended to be OP, he's an in-game event, 2 per save file mon, and he's very iconic. He's also associated with trainer Red, and is on his team at the end of GSC, so yeah obviously intended to be a top tier mon.
@@howard_blast I have no idea what your arbitrary cutoff for popularity is, but there's over a million OU Pokemon games on Showdown a month. There are thousands of battles across all tiers at any given time. Clearly there's interest - **certainly** more interest than in speedrunning or doing solo runs - and even if the "average" player has no interest, it's OBVIOUS that competitive players are among the most dedicated players. Your argument is "I assure you, the average person does not enjoy academic scholarship about [subject]' - of course they don't!
Mons having variable stats in no way leads one to conclude that the interactions you described in detail as being *intentional* were actually foreseen by developers.
@@howard_blast In the first place calling Gyarados OU viable is downright dishonest (he is a very niche E ranked Pokemon. You can say the same thing about Golduck or Dodrio. Porygon is higher ranked). The starter has NONE of the three mons every viable OU team *must* have (remember? those three the pokemon your video is about the *intentional* design of?). And his Exeggcutor has three moves. Still think this argument makes sense?
@@etymonlegomenon931 Hindsight is 20/20. I think the correct explanation is that a lot of decision with interesting("dramatic") consequences were done based on intuition, but in Gamefreak's more purposeful "corrective" measures, something was lost. What's being attempted is dissecting why those discarded, intuition-based decisions are interesting and worth building on.
Honestly.. Anyone that thinks the Combat in newer version of PKMN is something wrong with the franchise, is probably blind. EVERYTHING else with the PKMN games is the problem!
But it's interesting to see someone taking strange lessons from a mess of a game to try and make something new with it!
The simplistic combat back then wasn't the draw for me.. but the world, the adventure and the creatures. Nowadays, the almost rock-paper-scissor gameplay found in VGC is what makes PKMN good (as it is quite different and focused in mind games).
So, seeing lolis immediately does not appeal to me. Good luck, but I don't see how something based on these ideas being actually popular. Specially since it is something that feels old and has evolved a lot already.
The appeal of my game is going to be the story writing first and foremost, but otherwise I'm going to put a ton of effort into finetuning the gameplay into something inherently addictive and satisfying.
Lolis are going to take over the world soon.
*Lists a bunch of things that make gen one unbalanced and later gens better*
And that's why gen one is the best balanced and most fun pokemon game by far.
If you want the most balanced turn based game, why aren't you playing chess or Japanese Go?
If you insist on having RNG involved, there's always mahjong which is objectively more balanced than all Pokemon games.
Should Pokemon just become one of those games?
@fuecOHKO I honestly think you're missing the point, it isn't that it is actually balanced which they never claimed to be the case. Its that the imbalance creates a type of tension in the player that few games have ever replicated, they create positions where you have to make incredibly tough calls and this drama makes gen 1 competitive play compelling in a way that almost nothing else can. Sure it's unbalanced, sure it's even broken at times, and it is definitely simplier in its design too, but these are unintentionally strengths in a weird way. You'd get it if you ever played gen 1 competitively.
@@calebmon Exactly
Lol exactly.
Gen 1 has its virtues, but the broken battling system is NOT one of them.
A lot of these statements made in this video come across as someone with out much experience in the modern competitive scene.
And there are just a lot of bold statements made without any real evidence to support it beyond ones interpretation of how the gen 1 system works.
If you don't by into the very premise of gen 1 battles being filled with more drama then modern battles then the whole video collapses on itself
Guess I misunderstood the point of the video or something.
0:11 15 is not a good number on a game that promotes variety and asks you to catch'em all! Especially when "all" is 151 creatures, 10 times more!
Bro just straight up choose to ignore the many many flaws in the old not very well programmed game and say it was the best designed game in the franchise. Like, the games ARE good (like any pokemon game), but you sound ridiculous.
Nah, man I laid out good points about how the game was designed to ultimately place the mons in a hierarchy. There's a lot more than 15 viable in OU anyway, one player, Heat From Fire, boasts an impressive 87% win ratio on ladder, often hitting number 1, and he always uses at least 1 of the notoriously "unviable" fire type mons to great effect. There's something closer to like 30 mons that you can genuinely use to your advantage, which is honestly kind of really big considering there's only like 81 fully evolved ones.
Because Gen 1 is so stable with its meta also, the element of surprise in battle is absolutely huge, so it rewards less conventional picks a lot for good players. It also makes them waaaaay more interesting as unconventional picks.
Crazy to destroy any sense of your own credibility with the title alone lmao
Gen Won.
5 bucks this guy a Gen 5 fan
gen wunner, it's not the best, you are factually incorrect
Gen won.
It was well enough to say we were calling it early for the franchise back when new releases were still showing signs life, but the path from GSC to SV is *crystal* clear hindsight.
It took them 3 generations to figure out how to do split special and universal crit rates in a way that made different pokemon feel unique and dynamic in a way that was innate to gen 1's mechanics. After that, there was nowhere left to go but gimmicks and they get sadder every gen.
Face it kid, history has declared us the gen winners
@@gonzoengineering4894 Well said.
Lmfao
Why loli ?
Why not
@@howard_blast Because sexualizing children is bad, actually
@@Smartfellaandfartsmella You're obviously a sex offender, my dude.