All i remember doing with the pokeblocks is mixing berries with a high stat in what i wanted, fed those berries to my pokemon until it didnt eat anymore and i figured it was maxed out for that pokemon and proceded to stomp contests. Man, I had no idea it was this deep.
That's what I do. I grow a bunch of the Berry Master's wife's one-off berries and turn that into Pokeblocks. For Safari Zone, I use the cheaper berries.
I made a bunch of blocks all because I wanted to feed my pokemon. Not for stats, not for glory but out of sheer willpower and kindness in wanting a pokemon as a pet
I imagine actually GETTING the flute would've been the hard part. Maybe you had to do some big, complex side quest to find the flute in a ruin somewhere?
I was one of the nutjobs who wanted all ribbons on a single mon as a kid. I knee nothing about all this, yet achieved my goal through sheer pure grinding. Man, the things we did as a kid
Me too, but in Platinum. I had all ribbons on a Gardevoir from Gen 4 to Gen 6. Before Gen 7 I put most of my pokemon into bank. And then the games took a long time. I didn't pay bank every time and after 2 years, my pokemon were deleted. My Ribbon-Queen, lost.
As someone who has worked as a programmer, this definitely feels like something a programmer/programming team was tasked to implement, but then had *no* opportunity to work with the other teams about. It would explain why the NPCs give barely any hints as to how Pokèblocks work; NPCs were likely handled by a dedicated person/team, who were only given a rough idea of how Pokèblocks worked.
In the Pokemon anime, the writers made it seem like becoming a champion Pokemon Coordinator was a worthy goal on level with becoming a champion Pokemon Trainer. With regards to the contests in the main series games, I think that the game designers weren't willing to commit to making an alternative path to victory through contests. They could have put a few legendary pokemon as the exclusive reward at the end of that path. Latios and Latias for generation III. Cresselia for generation IV.
Maybe. The game had 12 programmers, and only specifies a battle team and field team. I'm willing to bet they wanted it to be complicated so that it wouldn't be figured out.
It looks like at first they wanted to make a branched path where you can finish the games in differentways,, but they end deciding in leaving it as a big minigame of sorts.@@Sarah-yd9gt
I love how the black pokeblock was made specifically to punish the player for using the same berry only to end up as the most viable one thanks to the e-reader. Truly the greatest comeback of all time.
I remember this mechanic being featured in Far Cry 3. When the bad guy asks "Did I ever tell you what the true definition of insanity?" and then proceeds to boot up Pokemon Ruby on a GBA. Good times.
I remember going on a tear for a few days, plowing through the Beauty contests with ease. My Weezing was the most beautiful poisonous ball of floating gas there was.
And the anime always tried to promote that as equally valid path for trainers through May, Dawn and Serena so it's not like the expectation that there could be game focused on just would have been unwarranted
@G-DORA the paths from black and white and bw2 😢 Champion Professor Gym leader Movie star Add contests the Coordinator as they called it Pokémon breeder+groomer
I love being obsessed with one specific pokemon line because when at 44:30, the typhlosion used surf, i immediately noticed and was like "wait, that's illegal"
The more I learn about old Pokemon mechanics the more I'm convinced that developers made them overly complicated on purpose just so people wouldn't try to optimize the fun out of the games. Judging by the videos I keep seeing it would seem that they failed.
I disagree. While the mechanics are overly complicated, Pokemon is a children's game and including information on how natures work and how they relate to pokeblock and base stats in the actual game would be way too confusing for a child even in its most simple forms. However, understanding the details of these mechanics means you can have so much more control over your Pokemon's growth and beat aspects of the game that are made to be challenging and targeted towards an older audience. There are nintendo licensed guides out there that outline many aspects of these mechanics so it's clear that nintendo wanted you to understand them and take advantage of them but only if you made the effort to seek them out. It's this level of complexity that imo makes these older games so much more special and replayable than the simplified souless crap they release now-a-days. I'm glad nintendo included detailed and complex mechanics like this back in gen 3 and sad that they are completely bereft from their games from the last decade and a half.
@@bigshaxx2446 Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire and Soul Silver and Heat Gold are what I would consider the games that break that mold of being "just for kids". The only two games worth playing imo.
The black Pokéblock secretly being the most efficient reminds me of how on the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild it's perfectly acceptable to cook and eat wood because restoring 1/4th of a heart when you only have 3 hearts, the game has a Focus Sash-style "live on 1/4th a heart if you have full health" mechanic, and actual food is more valuable in the early game, you can just start eating garbage to top off your hearts instead of wasting apples and stuff
Munching on wood is also incredibly useful in Trial of the Sword, given how scarce the food is! Just chuck a bomb at every tree you see, another one to neatly chop em down into batches, and cook them at the next resting spot! Bam, reliable source of healing, even in Master Mode!
I assume they didn’t want to call sheen “hunger” so that players wouldn’t feel guilty for not feeding their Pokemon, and fill them up with whatever Pokeblocks were available ASAP.
"In many ways, Pokeblocks are a representation of the series as a whole: deep, complicated, and never explained in any capacity." Ah, a formula as old as time. Such a classic Pokemon move. Gotta love it.
Genuinely, the amount of information obfuscation in Pokemon is criminal. You touched on it at the end, but when it comes to competitive it's just insulting. Information gathering is damn near impossible without a million external documents that oftentimes require ripping open the code, but that's just the first step! All the theory and mechanics knowledge in the world doesn't change the fact that actually GETTING a competitively viable team is complete and utter garbage. blisy's videos go into this in the appropriate level of detail, and once you watch those, really the only takeaway is "you know, I get why hacking is so rampant in the competitive scene".
I played competitive for years in the draft format and the thought of using the actual console versions rather than showdown, let alone legitimately obtaining the team, is hilariously impossible. I can understand the need to balance the competitive scene with the game being about collecting and trading, but at the moment the difficulty of gathering perfect competitively viable pokemon is just an absurd obstacle to attempt to overcome in the name of "legitimacy"
I'll never understand the "But they obfuscated it to make it more fun!" crowd, when there are in-game competitions such as contests and the battle frontier that require you to understand how they work to actually succeed in them. "Wow this game would be more fun if I didn't know how to play it" said no one ever
I'd love a deep dive on the Battle Frontier in Emerald. What it was, what it achieved, what it would inspire in the future, and what was left behind. And hey, it'd be one Emerald subject to another, so... consistency? You could even say it has real... smoothness.
It's so weird that they went out of their way to add a side gamemode with contests and then made the process to play it so freakishly obscure AND having it be timegated by having to wait to regrow berries on top of that. What were they thinking??
[Laughs in Pearl] bro you have no idea. Pokemon Pearl became a farming sim for me because I was obsessed with winning contests. I put so many hours into Puffins and collecting accessories....I was honestly disappointed with the remake as it totally skipped the difficulty of winning contests and thus the satisfaction of winning. I barely did any SP contests. Pearl supremacy!
i think pokemon is one of those games/series that doesn't explicitly acknowledge the existence of its copious fan-made databases and wikis, but assumes that basically everyone who plays will be using them anyway, and if they aren't, they're probably too young to even care about any of the deep stats in the first place. i wish more games would just acknowledge that they are games and that people will want as much information about what they're doing as possible, and make it available on the face of the thing instead of making the absolute most dedicated portion of the fanbase do all the heavy lifting for them. either way, excellent video that had me enthralled in a mechanic i didn't even know existed.
keep in mind: these games all have a catching tutorial at the start of the game. the literal fundamental mechanic to the entire series. that everyone and their grandma knows how to do, without even being told. these games are insane.
I've been shown how to catch a pokemon like 20 times, but I haven't been told what a nature actually does when it's been relevant across 15 of those games
@@strider_hiryu850 IVs are indirectly referred to in the more recent games (and shown in-game via the Judge function). EVs are referred to in newer generation games as "base points."
@@Tahngarthor yeah nowadays they've made these things a little less hidden. but keep in mind that for half the franchises generations, they were much more hidden.
@@shjilz A parent posted a picture of a pill with ‘z3d’ on it trying to figure out what drugs their kid was taking. It ending up being an upside down pez candy
It's clear that contests were meant to be a fully realized alternative to pokemon battles. The mechanics are super deep and actually pretty cool if you explore them.
There is something indescribably melancholic about games that are still available and playable, but with either cut or disabled content. It commands a feeling of futility or unreality.
25:51 Unlike what you might think, liking or disliking a pokeblock does not increase or decrease friendship. I've learned this the hard way, thinking I could feed my Swellow a pokeblock he liked to boost friendship, and therefore, the power of Return
I thought this was another cozy Pokemon video to fall asleep too, but the Sheen talk gave me flashbacks to kid me playing Emerald that were so anxiety inducing it woke me up.
You can also jump in place with the Acro Bike to get infinite encounters without using up steps in the Safari Zone, which is not only faster and much easier to perform, but is also compatible with using speedup
@@Green24152 Because cheats change the method, speedup is just acknowledging that people have lives and can't be spending hours on video games but still want to experience the originally intended method
As a big fan of May in the show, I was HYPED to finally start doing Pokemon Contests when I got Sapphire. Except... I couldn't find the person who gave me the Pokeblock Box for a long, LONG time, so they literally wouldn't even let me compete. And when I did, the pokeblock mechanic was so absurdly obtuse, I couldn't win a single one. It was one of the main reasons the Gen 3 games was my least favorite growing up. I had a ton of fun with it in ORAS, though! It was a really fun minigame! :)
For the next topic, how about berries themself? Flavor, color, growth rates, yield rates, distribution mechanics (wild hold item, shaking trees, batlle environments in gen 6), natural gift, cross breeding in gen 6, mulches, etc.
Growth and yield alone, along with the ridiculous bp requirements for some berries in gen 3 all adds up to making these pokeblocks (or even learning about pokeblocks) an absolute shitshow.
In my opinion, the deliberate obscuring of the mechanics feeds into what had been one of Pokémon's core tenets from the beginning: social interaction. Players are getting together and comparing notes, co-authoring documentation, making videos, and in general interacting socially with one another. It's beautiful, really.
I mean you don’t even need to know any of this to reach most things you’d want to achieve in-game, like winning Master ranks and evolving Milotic is achievable without completely min-maxing everything
@standard-carrier-wo-chan OP is talking about fostering socialization and community in Pokemon players. Nich, complicated mechanics that take decades for anyone to decipher doesn't do that. It frustrates the people currently playing who want to min max, and does nothing for the casuals currently playing who ignorantly stumble their way through. Complicated puzzles? Sure, there's a clear indication there's something wacky you're supposed to do so people can just talk about it. Complicated mechanics require people to sit and play through those mechanics over and over and over again to figure out and chart. You shouldn't have to do homework to be able to play a video game. It doesn't make people talk about those mechanics fondly, it makes them hate those mechanics.
29:58 oh boy I feel so called out. As a kid, after I managed to beat every Master Rank contest, I tried to get my favorite Umbreon to get every Ribbon in my Ruby cartridge, but I obviously knew nothing about the actual math, so I just tried to get the best Pokéblocks I could with the best berries I could get at the time - Spelon, Pamtre, Watmel, Durin and Belue. As you can imagine, I couldn't max any of those 5 contest stats, so I basically had to nail the 2nd phase every time. Some of those contests were hellish, given Umbreon's somewhat limited movepool - God knows how many times I had to retry for some of those. I managed to do it in the end, and somehow I even had the gall to try it again on Gen 4 (it was even more brutal...) Watching the video really made me miss contests, although I don't know if I'd be as invested as I was after knowing all the math and optimizations. I did enjoy experimenting with movesets and combos, but thinking about how much time it takes to get good berries and Pokéblocks... But well, putting in so much time into it was part of the fun. Thank you for the great video!
I’m sorry but the “ … OH SHIT THE SAFARI ZONE” Gets me every single time I rewatch this. The way you say it is so funny and I cannot explain. I love it. 10/10
I remember looking into the basics when these games first came out and going 'wow this is complicated'. Now, watching this video, it's more like 'WTF WHY DID THEY DO ALL THIS???' 😂
I am one of those people who went for all the ribbons. Of course when gen 3 was the current gen, I had no idea what I was doing, so I maxed sheen without reason and just used explosion on the last round to win. Took a decade or something, but that Electrode finally has true maxed stats. Unreal how ridiculously complex this all was.
@@Boobo_000 To be fair, in the Anime Brock's Pineco kept exploding on his trainer once an episode because it found it amusing. So I take it thatordering that move wouldn't be seen as quite such a negative thing, even though it should be very draining.
This is unironically one of my favorite vids I've watched in a while. I remembering being so hecking confused about pokeblocks back in the day, and it's nice to know I wasn't just dumb and it is actually just unreasonably complicated haha
Personally, the award for 'dear god why did they make this so complicated' goes to beefalo taming in Don't Starve. If you're interested in spiraling into insanity, James Bucket has a good video explaning it. The whole thing is ridiculous to the point that any interest I had in possibly having a beefalo mount was crushed permanently upon learning what the 'process' consists of
@@frownyclowny6955 Zubat is honestly solid, it's just got a reputation of being terrible because it infests caves AND is commonly used by weak opponents (rocket grunts for exemple), making it look awful. But poison/flying is a really solid typing and the pokemon is easy to get with some solid use cases. It's not the most busted thing you can get by a long shot but it's really not that hard to include in a team.
Both of these were very excellent videos; very thorough explanations, and good editing. And even more fuel to ensure that Masuda never, ever lives down the "Azure Flute was too complicated" quote.
My theory is that GameFreak has some sort of collaboration with an university and take interns from there to "bring something innovating", but interns can't change the core of the game, so we get these hyper complex, focused and niche mechanics as "skill tests"
That...um...I don't want to be rude but...no. Interns are not having that large of an influence on a game, let alone a billion dollar franchise. The more likely culprit is a mixture of never having built something like [system name here] before, overthinking it, wanting to encourage the community working together at the expense of individual players fun, and crunch/deadlines preventing the mechanics from being fleshed out as much as they may have wanted.
I've been very comfortable with Evs, Ivs, natures, abilities, Types, what moves do, and on and on. I have no experience with any of this Pokeblock stuff and I am really glad to finally understand how complicated it can be and the ins and outs of the process. I want to know all there is to know about these childhood games. :)
i always find the names of the berries funny, they either only change 1 letter of the fruit/veggie it's based off of or just spell it backwards and call it a day
The Macho Brace is another case of "lets you mess with the intricate mechanics but doesn't actually tell you that". I used it in Ruby a lot because the description is like "The pokemon using this will grow faster, but with lower speed" and I thought that meant more exp. Turns out it's effort values.
Gamefreak is truly unique. Whether it's old or new Gamefreak: they got some mad genius coders working for them. Coders capable of hyper specific mechanics you don't think too much of. I really didn't think Pokeblocks were... this complicated.
I remember only one thing about the Pokeblock as kid. I always thought it was just a fruit blender that turns berries into pez candies. And the way that it needs more than 1 people to throw iin something is like a hotpot dinner but for your pokemon.
Hard to rewind for those nature-based animations on mobile, so I'm just putting these timecodes here for personal ease of access: First batch: 45:55 Second batch: 45:59 Third batch: 46:04 Fourth batch: 46:10 Fifth batch: 46:17
I don't like making you get into the contest side of the games, but I would really love a deep dive into how the move part of these contests work and what strategies are optimal.
I do have an idea for why most complex mechanics aren't directly explained to the player. Recent Pokemon games have been trying to walk the line between casual and competitive play, but they're likely aware that the majority of their players don't know what an effort value is and don't care/need to know. When it comes to casual play, randomness and unpredictability can be favored over the consistency that is valued in competitive play, so mechanics like EVs, IVs, natures, and more aren't fully explained because they give a degree of variance to everyone's Pokemon and make them all a little more unique. So when, as a random example, someone's Kricketune survives a Giga Impact from Cynthia's Garchomp, they don't have to think about the damage formula or what numbers had to align to make that possible, or the numerous more optimal things they could have done instead of letting a singing bug tank a land shark. They can just think "my Kricketune is the best". Items like the mints are there to give a wink and a nudge to the competitive players who'll know what they do and make their job of finely tuning their teams easier, while casual players probably won't be too confused by their simple descriptions. I'm someone who's almost always in favor of the side content and minigames in the core Pokemon games, and I'd love to see Contests or something similar make a return. When the amount of content available in a game increases over time, I can understand the idea of simplifying parts of the mechanics so that the player doesn't have to spend as much time learning intricate details when there's other stuff to do. I imagine that Pokeblocks in Gen 3 were as esoteric as they were because they wanted to avoid people gaming the system and instead have players work with what they got. Given their rework in ORAS, I doubt they'd go back to something as complex again, but as long as there's still depth to the content that it's supporting (Contests are complex enough as it is, which is probably why they thought that Pokeblocks didn't need to be as complex), I'll probably still enjoy it.
I imagine the ‘Sheen’ stat being related to ‘fullness’ isn’t actually the idea. You’d assume a Pokémon gets to eat every day, it’s just that feeding a Pokémon a PokeBlock increases their “Sheen”. Whether that’s supposed to represent the shininess of their fur or how thick it is I don’t know (it’s definition is soft lustre, whatever the fuck that means). So you can feed them as much as you’d like but eventually their fur will shine a certain way and will never improve. I think Sheen is a good word to describe it actually
Thing is, it doesn't convey information very well at all. It technically fits as a description of what's happening, but you'd never guess what it means mechanically without trial and error.
I feel like people are looking too deep into it. I think they wanted to use the stars to illustrate the amount of pokeblocks you could give and then went with "sheen" to describe it because it makes the pokemon shine. Nothing to do with hunger or their coat, purely describes the stars.
This has always been what I thought. "Sheen" or "Luster" is one of the criteria used to judge a dog's fur in dog show. It's pretty much how shiny it's coat is. Now, how that corresponds to stars and how many Pokeblocks...it still barely makes sense.
I remember 12 year old me wanting a Milotic so when I was looking into how to evolve it i went down the pokeblock hole a bit, and this reminds me so much of that time but in a much more in depth look than i could ever imagine
I watched both your most recent videos when they randomly came up on my feed. I didn't notice the view count until I finished this one, and I am honestly dumbfounded. This is so well researched, scripted and edited that I just assumed it was from a large content creator. You deserve so much more. You've earned a sub, and I'll be sharing these videos with friends. Keep doing what you're doing and best of luck!
when you talked about black pokeblocks i just imagined an image of a pokemon drawn over the sad seal saying "he was force fed black pokeblocks when he was 6"
The way you breakdown info and your style of explaination is perfect man Before going into said topic, you layout each step you want to accomplish It's basically a brain-itch for my anxiety when approaching overwhelming information. Super digestible 😌. Thank you for the hard work.
Not going to lie, I'd love to see you do Pomeg Glitches in this style of video essay. I feel like they're not very well understood by anyone, and having someone actually do a deep-dive into what causes each variation and how it's useful (or otherwise) would be a really fun video. Who knows, maybe you'll get credited as the person who finds a brand-new Pomeg Glitch variation that revolutionizes speedrunning 👀
Great video! small editing suggestion: during overlays, when you darken the background footage, you should consider adding a blurred effect as well. As it is, it kinda felt like my phone was going into power saving mode.
Pokeblocks in gen 3 was such a complicated mechanic to get right when I was going for a ribbon master. I would love a Pokémon game all about contests lol
Videogame science videos are soo much fun, and this one is great and had me fully engrossed! Thank you for showing me the crazy depths behind this minigame I playef like twice XD
Y'know your conclusion reminds me of probably my favourite aspect of scarlet and violet. The fact they made nature changing items and more especially EV training items items available early on is so cool. On each playthrough I basically just bench my starter in the early game just so I can EV train them later on, it's so much fun to actually be involved in your pokemon training process as early as before you even got your first badge. S/V have a lot of issues, but they still brought so much to the table.
I really love games that have almost puzzle-like in-depth layers of mechanics and I wish more games were like that today. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but I love how these kinds of mechanic can really make a game feel alive with how tiny things make each player have a somewhat different experience. Excellent video essay. Subscribed.
@@moppycat2669 Very true. Pokemon kinda hits that awkward spot where the competitive scene makes these mechanics look incredibly annoying to deal with (because they are in that case). It's a shame because future Pokemon games have just been trying to simplify more and more as they cater to a younger audience and the competitive scene (to a limited extent).
I checked your channel after watching this and was surprised to see that you only had a couple of video essay style stuff like this. This was super thorough and well structured and really enjoyable to watch! I hope you do more of this type of videos in the future!
This awakened something in me. I just scrambled to buy a nutpea berry card from eBay. I have my original hardware, game, and e-reader ready to go. I've played Ruby/Sapphire since they came out, but never got good at the contests. I think I am finally going to go for that all ribbon Scizor I've been dreaming about.
@@Jeffeffery9 That's good to hear Shadow Golduck is yet another fantastic Ribbon Pokemon due to being in EVERY single Pokemon game There's actually no way of telling if Scyther shares the same fate since Golduck's pre-evolution is Masuda's favorite but so far it's very very good too
Excited to be in on the ground floor of a well-produced essay channel! Honestly the bizarre intricacies of gen 3 being incomprehensible to child-me and hoping the internet could help me back when it was still novel is a good chunk of what endeared me to the series in the first place, so it's great to see an explanation like this (I had no clue what the secondary colors meant, really). It might be cool to see a deep dive on something like how pokerus generates or the battle facilities over the years. If you're looking for more (relatively) obscure, FRLG probably has some good material
I tried to do my own research on this a few months ago because I needed to talk about it and I could not understand a lot of it. This video is amazing and it broke down so much stuff in a very neat and interesting way. This is some amazing work here. Like seriously well done!
An insanely well done, produced, and presented video. I really appreciate the documentation of mechanics and intricacies that many people have either not thought about, or have been unable to look into/understand.
It's wild that there was no way to reset stats and start feeding pokeblocks all over again, I remember fumbling around with making berries and being stuck with a feebas not beautiful enough to evolve. Great work on the video, I had never heard of the e reader berries before so that was neat.
"...[T]here's clearly a desire to learn about this sort of thing" My guy, I am here as if I am attending a glass-bottom boat tour, waiting for the moment when the dropoff / shipwreck comes into view, to listen to the tour guide explains it, all the while I am latched onto the safety rails as if there were even a chance I was going to fall into these nighmarish depths. This was horrifying. Thank you for this tour.
I don't know why hearing Z10 Briefing out of nowhere brought me so much joy, but you have brought a smile to my face good sir. BLADE needs more people like you.
This is one of the most entertaining pokemon videos I’ve watched in a while. Easily as good as someone like Absolblogs or Johnstone. Also the music was killer
As I was watching the video I was thinking "Gosh that seemed like a nightmare" then when ORAS was brought up, and I remembered how simple it was in those games I began to think that, maybe I preferred the old way? Sure it was tedious but at least it was interesting. Also as a potential deep dive what about the decline of event Pokémon? How it went from fun quests like Celebi in Crystal or Shaymin in Platinum to just codes for shiny legendaries that they shiny-locked for the sake of exclusivity.
I was literally just talking to a friend about this. The last time I went to a Nintendo Event was for platinum. Toys R Us for the event regigigas, and GameStop for the Member’s Card
Eh, as a player who started in gen 6 and revisited the older games, there's certain tedious things that feel rewarding, and some that just.. suck. This.. is the latter. Mainly due to Milotic imo, as I never found contests interesting. I think Super Training was honestly the best example of a mini game that helps your Pokemon out in the series so far. (not counting spinoffs)
I’m gonna hard disagree with that. These sorts of systems that are unnecessarily complicated for 0 good reason can absolutely be worse than those that are simply and a tad boring. Would I prefer some of the earlier game’s systems? Sure, the minigame was fun, and I liked maxing out stats for contests. But so much of the process is obscured, and without ways to reverse progress, or at least sheen-lowering berries, it feels like the game is punishing me. Instead of being neutral and boring, it feels actively bad.
Screw event pokemon. I hate event pokemon. The new system is an improvement. It's nice that "mythicals" are inside the game the entire time and you don't need to be in the right place at the right time IN REAL LIFE to unlock the quest. Remember that in America, Marshadow was distributed ONCE ever. Marshadow and Volcanion are now completely purely unobtainable. I'd rather them be shinylocked but obtainable than "from now on only hackers can dream of obtaining these"
@@shybandit521 And most of those quest, if any ever did, never make it to the rest of america, they're only fun for the US and Canada, I much prefer a code everyone can get than being locked from something so the US can have more fun.
deep dive videos for niche video game content like this are my absolute cup of tea, i really enjoyed the video and the effort you put into researching for it. while i don’t think it’s nearly as complicated as pokeblocks, i’d love to see something about hgss’s pokeathlon.
54:00 Gotta love how there's a franchise that adds stuff like this, _never_ explains how _any_ of it works, but the fans still find ways to learn it and share on their own. (Not that I wouldn't prefer the games say at least something, but at least it does get learned.)
As someone who has always loved and adored contests...THANK YOU FOR EXPLAINING THIS STUFF qvq My brain can barely comprehend all the calculations I'll have to do anyway, but man. man! Little me was always baffled whenever I suddenly couldn't feed my pokemon anymore. Even to this day, I still get the Desire to do more contest stuff, and having this info in mind will hopefully help me strategize better rather than just going, "wow, that sure is a number!", and hoping for the best-- I am conflicted on the ORAS version of contests. On one hand, they're still pretty fun, and I went up to Master rank way easier than I ever got anywhere in the og contests, but on the other I was genuinely really looking forward to the return of the pokeblock mini-game with easier-to-access berries. Which I guess kinda sums up a thought I just got whilst typing this; between the simplification of contests and outright removal of the beloved Battle Frontier to be left with a "to be made :3" sign...it feels like there was both a lot of love and effort were put into ORAS and at the same time there was some kind of genuine disdain for anyone who genuinely wanted to do side stuff. I feel like the only thing that kept contests intact in the slightest was that they were so prominent in Ruby and Sapphire, and they could add a cute alternate pikachu to it. (Which, to be fair, I love that pikachu.) I was never a fan of the Battle Frontier, but even I felt like I got personally slapped in the face seeing that sign. (And then BDSP went and completely gutted the contests............) I'm definitely a fan of making things more accessible and perhaps not SO complicated you need to actually stare at the code and then do days or longer of research to understand it, but nnot so much where the games have decided "ain't nobody got time for that anyway", and just...leaves everything in the dust if they can't fit it into a nice and neat 10-20min max of added playtime, and god forbid they have to explain something other than the absolute base mechanics... To end on a much happier note, though! I did not realize there were different feeding animations for different natures. I absolutely adore little touches like that ;;w;; oh my gosh
you could do a video covering a bunch of minor things, like the gold leaves in HGSS, the fact you can increase happiness of pokemon in some games by training them in the route you catch them in. You know, things that aren't worth a full video on their own. Or maybe you could do the HGSS Safari Zone, but that's not as complicated as it seems afaik, it just requires a lot of waiting.
RUclips recommended you to me and this was the first video I watched of yours. Holy crap, I never actually knew how the Safari Zone and Pokeblocks worked until this. Thank you.
The oras games are really bizarre when it comes to probability in general, not just for pokeblocks. To this day, the dexnav odds are still not fully understood, despite the fact that they would be really useful for shiny hunting and getting hidden abilities; for a while, we didn't even know if cresselia was random, and I'm fairly certain the odds are still completely undocumented. I'd honestly love to see someone make a video on this problem and what causes it
So, I saw this one video while scrolling through my recommended tab and thought "An one hour long video on Pokéblocks? Who in the world watches that stuff? Only to realize, as a complete Pokéblock/Poffin nutcase, that that person is me! The production quality of this video was beyond excellent! I was very surprised to see that this seems to be the first video of you to take off. Even though I knew almost everything about the stuff about the stats of Pokéblocks, the video was so well-made and compellingly written I just had to watch it all! Despite having spent dozens of hours researching Pokéblocks throughout the years, there was some stuff in this video I didn't even know about, really cool! Keep up the gooď work man! Really great video!
Just gotta say, for all the effort that went into this video, you deserve waaaaaay more subscribers than you have. Super high quality video essay! Also “OH SHIT THE SAFARI ZONE” killed me lmao
Everything in this video is explained in a crystal clear manner, the editing is on point and the effort you put in is more than evident. Thanks for your hard work, you honestly deserve much more.
Some part of me wishes they kept the old system because as a kid, it just made sense that pokemon would like certain flavours more than others. As far back as the first guide book, the idea that each individual pokemon is different (yes, the first RBY guidebook I had had a screenshot talking about stat differences, even if they didn't outright say, hey, look, DVs!) was a thing. So it made sense. Heck, I even eventually noticed certain correlations, because I played the games way too much as a kid. Even the idea that pokemon eventually get full made sense (even if it would have made MORE sense if that fullness reset eventually). You know, as "living beings that you sorta but not quite understand". The fact that there's a ridiculous amount of stuff under the hood, is cool. In games like the Dragon Warrior Monsters titles with its personality values, I like it just as much. But, I understand why they simplified it - it just makes sense if they wanted to go much more child-focused, as they did over the years. I just kind of wish they tried to incorporate it more visibly yet still organically. That would add so much to the mons personality-wise while actually explaining things. Again with the Dragon Warrior Monsters example: in that game, an NPC just tells you "It's easier to nurture monsters, when they are young" and it's enough for you to know that their personality changes easier if you give commands at low levels, because you can observe that. It made monsters so life-like while making the mechanic visible. In any case, my rambling aside, this was a really cool deepdive. Very well presented too. I enjoyed it a lot!
More childish over the years? Ash is a 10 year old boy. The player character in all games is 10. The games have always been and continue to be made for 10 year olds.
First off, child-focused and childish are two very different words with very different meanings. I used one over the other on purpose. Second, how much you focus on a certain target audience is on a scale and can change over time. Oftentimes, a new franchise might look at its metrics and really zero in on the most profitable group, even if they were more scattershot before. You are correct in that Ash being 10 is a decent indicator of target audience, but other things, like the large amount of behind-the-scenes stuff that can be interesting, some more mature jokes and even just stuff like the Pokemon Tower actually dealing with matters of blood and death (the Channeler dialogues, but also NPCs) tell me that their amount of focus on certain groups definitely shifted. I don't even blame them - 10-year olds are a fast regrowing impressionable audience (as crude as that sounds) and their parents (who likely grew up on Pokemon) don't need to be direactly adressed to still buy into it. It just makes sense.
This reminds me of Cybershell's Chao video. I absolutely love lengthy breakdowns of deceptively simple side mechanics in games that usually never get much thought.
About the Gen 3's lack of info about natures, there is one guy in a house in Slateport who says, "My Pokemon has a HASTY nature. It has higher SPEED compared to my other Pokemon. Maybe their nature has something to do with the stat gains of Pokemon." I can't remember if this was in R/S or if Gen 3 says anything else on natures, but it does at least give a hint. My conspiracy brain believes that the Pokemon Company deliberately obfuscated information back in the old days WHILE adding mechanics that required the use of that information, all to encourage players to purchase special guidebooks with more in-depth info. After all, any "official" guide likely had to pay for a license to use the Pokemon IP, or the publisher would even have to establish a contract to pay Pokemon a commission for every copy sold. Around Gen 4, the internet really took off as a free means to find this in-depth information, so Pokemon probably saw no reason to provide more than cursory hints and items since they knew curious players were likely going to compile, search, and find that stuff online anyway.
All i remember doing with the pokeblocks is mixing berries with a high stat in what i wanted, fed those berries to my pokemon until it didnt eat anymore and i figured it was maxed out for that pokemon and proceded to stomp contests. Man, I had no idea it was this deep.
the entire pokemon series in a nutshell
That's what I do. I grow a bunch of the Berry Master's wife's one-off berries and turn that into Pokeblocks. For Safari Zone, I use the cheaper berries.
@@JrIcifyFr
I made a bunch of blocks all because I wanted to feed my pokemon. Not for stats, not for glory but out of sheer willpower and kindness in wanting a pokemon as a pet
Lol
Just remember guys, the Azure Flute event was "too complicated" to be released
You’re supposed to use the azure flute to shoot a poke block into your pokemon’s mouth. If they do a backflip upon catching it, you can see Arceus.
That was litterally go to a place and a cut sceen plays.
@@Andrew-ww1hzi let out a scream
That's Gen 4, unless they f'ed up Poffins like Pokeblocks I'll assume they wizened up to the absolute insanity that they tried in Gen 3.
I imagine actually GETTING the flute would've been the hard part. Maybe you had to do some big, complex side quest to find the flute in a ruin somewhere?
I was one of the nutjobs who wanted all ribbons on a single mon as a kid. I knee nothing about all this, yet achieved my goal through sheer pure grinding. Man, the things we did as a kid
Which pokémon did you use?
@@dromalloma2651 shuppet
@@mercylessplayer Nice!
edit: it was sh uppet, but the comment isn't showing up for some reason...
Me too, but in Platinum.
I had all ribbons on a Gardevoir from Gen 4 to Gen 6. Before Gen 7 I put most of my pokemon into bank. And then the games took a long time. I didn't pay bank every time and after 2 years, my pokemon were deleted. My Ribbon-Queen, lost.
I did this by using a combo of overheat and sunny day on a Ninetales!
As someone who has worked as a programmer, this definitely feels like something a programmer/programming team was tasked to implement, but then had *no* opportunity to work with the other teams about.
It would explain why the NPCs give barely any hints as to how Pokèblocks work; NPCs were likely handled by a dedicated person/team, who were only given a rough idea of how Pokèblocks worked.
In the Pokemon anime, the writers made it seem like becoming a champion Pokemon Coordinator was a worthy goal on level with becoming a champion Pokemon Trainer. With regards to the contests in the main series games, I think that the game designers weren't willing to commit to making an alternative path to victory through contests. They could have put a few legendary pokemon as the exclusive reward at the end of that path. Latios and Latias for generation III. Cresselia for generation IV.
Maybe. The game had 12 programmers, and only specifies a battle team and field team. I'm willing to bet they wanted it to be complicated so that it wouldn't be figured out.
It looks like at first they wanted to make a branched path where you can finish the games in differentways,, but they end deciding in leaving it as a big minigame of sorts.@@Sarah-yd9gt
The 1 feel black pokeblock reversal is exactly the kind of dark sorcery this profane minigame deserves
I love how the black pokeblock was made specifically to punish the player for using the same berry only to end up as the most viable one thanks to the e-reader. Truly the greatest comeback of all time.
Once he firstly mentioned the black pokeblocks I fucking knew it would be the end game lmao
I remember this mechanic being featured in Far Cry 3. When the bad guy asks "Did I ever tell you what the true definition of insanity?" and then proceeds to boot up Pokemon Ruby on a GBA. Good times.
game freak: you cant have perfect contest stats >:(
nutpea 4 player: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh?
Finally, a comprehensive ressource on all things pokébloc, I now have something to quote in my academic research paper.
Yeah! 😂
Are you one of the “Pokémon academics” mentioned in Minun’s Emerald Pokédex entry?
@@andersjacobson2487
Well, nice to hear *some* people have heard of me for more than the raichu indian elephant debacle.
RAY GHOST TRICK??
I remember going on a tear for a few days, plowing through the Beauty contests with ease. My Weezing was the most beautiful poisonous ball of floating gas there was.
As a kid, I wanted a contest-focused game. The gyms were just the main quest. The contests were the one reason I spent hours on the game.
And the anime always tried to promote that as equally valid path for trainers through May, Dawn and Serena so it's not like the expectation that there could be game focused on just would have been unwarranted
when i was a kid i spent so much time doing the contests in ruby because i had no idea how they worked, a simpler time indeed
@@retrohanska4441ughhh as i grew older, i felt contests were more fun
@@mibaojthe dream pokemon game would be one where you could progress however you want, battles or contests.
@G-DORA the paths from black and white and bw2 😢
Champion
Professor
Gym leader
Movie star
Add contests the Coordinator as they called it
Pokémon breeder+groomer
I love being obsessed with one specific pokemon line because when at 44:30, the typhlosion used surf, i immediately noticed and was like "wait, that's illegal"
The more I learn about old Pokemon mechanics the more I'm convinced that developers made them overly complicated on purpose just so people wouldn't try to optimize the fun out of the games. Judging by the videos I keep seeing it would seem that they failed.
It worked, we're just now old enough that we can optimize the fun INTO games :)
I disagree. While the mechanics are overly complicated, Pokemon is a children's game and including information on how natures work and how they relate to pokeblock and base stats in the actual game would be way too confusing for a child even in its most simple forms. However, understanding the details of these mechanics means you can have so much more control over your Pokemon's growth and beat aspects of the game that are made to be challenging and targeted towards an older audience. There are nintendo licensed guides out there that outline many aspects of these mechanics so it's clear that nintendo wanted you to understand them and take advantage of them but only if you made the effort to seek them out. It's this level of complexity that imo makes these older games so much more special and replayable than the simplified souless crap they release now-a-days. I'm glad nintendo included detailed and complex mechanics like this back in gen 3 and sad that they are completely bereft from their games from the last decade and a half.
@@bigshaxx2446brilliant take 🙏
@@bigshaxx2446 Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire and Soul Silver and Heat Gold are what I would consider the games that break that mold of being "just for kids". The only two games worth playing imo.
@@zigfaust absolute brainlet take. The only pokemon game worth playing is either pokemon ranger: shadows of almia or pokemon rumble blast
Bro a 55 minute video on gen 3 contest mechanics is the most up my alley thing ever, thank you for making this.
The black Pokéblock secretly being the most efficient reminds me of how on the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild it's perfectly acceptable to cook and eat wood because restoring 1/4th of a heart when you only have 3 hearts, the game has a Focus Sash-style "live on 1/4th a heart if you have full health" mechanic, and actual food is more valuable in the early game, you can just start eating garbage to top off your hearts instead of wasting apples and stuff
Munching on wood is also incredibly useful in Trial of the Sword, given how scarce the food is! Just chuck a bomb at every tree you see, another one to neatly chop em down into batches, and cook them at the next resting spot! Bam, reliable source of healing, even in Master Mode!
@@fortunasempermecumest ...Oh god, I never realized this was an option. This changes everything.
Wait... You can cook and eat wood?!?! How am I just finding this out?! 😅
we goin beetle mode!
@@strange11220you can cook any material
I assume they didn’t want to call sheen “hunger” so that players wouldn’t feel guilty for not feeding their Pokemon, and fill them up with whatever Pokeblocks were available ASAP.
I think "hunger" also implies they would need to repeat the process rather than it being a permanent thing.
Appetite would be a more neutral word.
I literally can't ignore any Pokémon in Pokémon Sleep that are hungry, so maybe you're right!
It's because you're raising them for Pokemon contests - raising the sheen of their coats so they look their best.
@@mads_in_zeroyeah, I thought sheen was actually a decent word for it, and I remember it making sense as a little kid as well.
"In many ways, Pokeblocks are a representation of the series as a whole: deep, complicated, and never explained in any capacity."
Ah, a formula as old as time. Such a classic Pokemon move. Gotta love it.
It's just like real life and the existence of our universe as a whole! 😂
Genuinely, the amount of information obfuscation in Pokemon is criminal. You touched on it at the end, but when it comes to competitive it's just insulting. Information gathering is damn near impossible without a million external documents that oftentimes require ripping open the code, but that's just the first step! All the theory and mechanics knowledge in the world doesn't change the fact that actually GETTING a competitively viable team is complete and utter garbage. blisy's videos go into this in the appropriate level of detail, and once you watch those, really the only takeaway is "you know, I get why hacking is so rampant in the competitive scene".
I played competitive for years in the draft format and the thought of using the actual console versions rather than showdown, let alone legitimately obtaining the team, is hilariously impossible.
I can understand the need to balance the competitive scene with the game being about collecting and trading, but at the moment the difficulty of gathering perfect competitively viable pokemon is just an absurd obstacle to attempt to overcome in the name of "legitimacy"
I'll never understand the "But they obfuscated it to make it more fun!" crowd, when there are in-game competitions such as contests and the battle frontier that require you to understand how they work to actually succeed in them.
"Wow this game would be more fun if I didn't know how to play it" said no one ever
Just...play on showdown lmao,you can even play doubles on there
I'd love a deep dive on the Battle Frontier in Emerald. What it was, what it achieved, what it would inspire in the future, and what was left behind.
And hey, it'd be one Emerald subject to another, so... consistency? You could even say it has real... smoothness.
Yes absolutely!!
It's so weird that they went out of their way to add a side gamemode with contests and then made the process to play it so freakishly obscure AND having it be timegated by having to wait to regrow berries on top of that. What were they thinking??
The team was still passionate back then. Passion projects just tend to do weird stuff like that.
It was a test to see if we could figure out the upcoming Azure Flute
Gen 3 was a weird time.
They're bad at making games well.
[Laughs in Pearl] bro you have no idea. Pokemon Pearl became a farming sim for me because I was obsessed with winning contests. I put so many hours into Puffins and collecting accessories....I was honestly disappointed with the remake as it totally skipped the difficulty of winning contests and thus the satisfaction of winning. I barely did any SP contests. Pearl supremacy!
i think pokemon is one of those games/series that doesn't explicitly acknowledge the existence of its copious fan-made databases and wikis, but assumes that basically everyone who plays will be using them anyway, and if they aren't, they're probably too young to even care about any of the deep stats in the first place. i wish more games would just acknowledge that they are games and that people will want as much information about what they're doing as possible, and make it available on the face of the thing instead of making the absolute most dedicated portion of the fanbase do all the heavy lifting for them.
either way, excellent video that had me enthralled in a mechanic i didn't even know existed.
keep in mind: these games all have a catching tutorial at the start of the game. the literal fundamental mechanic to the entire series. that everyone and their grandma knows how to do, without even being told. these games are insane.
I've been shown how to catch a pokemon like 20 times, but I haven't been told what a nature actually does when it's been relevant across 15 of those games
@@ChestnutRiceandKamehameha not to mention IVs and other hidden mechanics.
@@ChestnutRiceandKamehamehaat least later games highlight the increased stat and reduced stat
And mints now outright tell you what each nature does
@@strider_hiryu850 IVs are indirectly referred to in the more recent games (and shown in-game via the Judge function). EVs are referred to in newer generation games as "base points."
@@Tahngarthor yeah nowadays they've made these things a little less hidden. but keep in mind that for half the franchises generations, they were much more hidden.
I love a version of black Pokeblock being technically efficient. 4 Nutpea Berry Pokeblock being 1 sheen 1 in all stats is hilarious.
*1 sheen, 2 in 3 random stats
Break the rules, win the game
Boy dinner
@@geisttraft7190 we have girl dinner, we have boy dinner, now we have poké dinner
@@geisttraft7190queue that picture of jerma eating lettuce
I still think they should have made a pez dispenser that looks like the pokeblock case
Oh no, not the dangerous z3d designer pills
continuation:
make the pack of candies that comes with it be correlated to the single-flavor pokeblock colors, flavor and all
@@pernajuel9771What the hell are you talking about
@@shjilz A parent posted a picture of a pill with ‘z3d’ on it trying to figure out what drugs their kid was taking. It ending up being an upside down pez candy
I FORGOT ABOUT PEZ UNTIL NOW
The real question though? How do you think they would taste? Are they gummies? Sugar cubes? Different flavors of tofu? Or brownie bites or something?
Seeing how it is basically a four fruits put in a blender, I would assume it would become a sort of mush with a weird color
I always imagined them as tasting a little like Fruitellas or Starbursts.
i always thought itd be like fudge or one of those fruit snack bars you get for kids lunchboxes
I imagine them tasting like soft fruit candies along with the flavor the color gives (red : spicy, yellow : sour, etc...)
My brain interprets them like a turkish delight or a fruit gummy i think
It's clear that contests were meant to be a fully realized alternative to pokemon battles. The mechanics are super deep and actually pretty cool if you explore them.
There is something indescribably melancholic about games that are still available and playable, but with either cut or disabled content. It commands a feeling of futility or unreality.
25:51 Unlike what you might think, liking or disliking a pokeblock does not increase or decrease friendship. I've learned this the hard way, thinking I could feed my Swellow a pokeblock he liked to boost friendship, and therefore, the power of Return
Truly walked so "Affection and Friendship are not the same thing" could run
I thought this was another cozy Pokemon video to fall asleep too, but the Sheen talk gave me flashbacks to kid me playing Emerald that were so anxiety inducing it woke me up.
You can also jump in place with the Acro Bike to get infinite encounters without using up steps in the Safari Zone, which is not only faster and much easier to perform, but is also compatible with using speedup
What does that mean for zone 3 which requires the mach bike?
@@TheStupidRaptor Oh yeah, good point, you can't do that in the Mach Bike exclusive areas of the Safari Zone
if you're using speedup why NOT just use codes to quickswap the two
@@Green24152 Because cheats change the method, speedup is just acknowledging that people have lives and can't be spending hours on video games but still want to experience the originally intended method
@@ZickDarkhaos It's still cheating.
As a big fan of May in the show, I was HYPED to finally start doing Pokemon Contests when I got Sapphire. Except... I couldn't find the person who gave me the Pokeblock Box for a long, LONG time, so they literally wouldn't even let me compete. And when I did, the pokeblock mechanic was so absurdly obtuse, I couldn't win a single one. It was one of the main reasons the Gen 3 games was my least favorite growing up.
I had a ton of fun with it in ORAS, though! It was a really fun minigame! :)
I did not want to learn about pokeblocks tonight. But i just watched the whole video. And now I'm an expert on gen 3 safari zones.
For the next topic, how about berries themself? Flavor, color, growth rates, yield rates, distribution mechanics (wild hold item, shaking trees, batlle environments in gen 6), natural gift, cross breeding in gen 6, mulches, etc.
Growth and yield alone, along with the ridiculous bp requirements for some berries in gen 3 all adds up to making these pokeblocks (or even learning about pokeblocks) an absolute shitshow.
Getting liechi berry by literally stealing from trainers in the battle tower
In my opinion, the deliberate obscuring of the mechanics feeds into what had been one of Pokémon's core tenets from the beginning: social interaction. Players are getting together and comparing notes, co-authoring documentation, making videos, and in general interacting socially with one another. It's beautiful, really.
Sure but look how many decades it took...
Very true, but still, it all happened, and without those obscurities i don't think the pokemons would have such devoted community
I mean you don’t even need to know any of this to reach most things you’d want to achieve in-game, like winning Master ranks and evolving Milotic is achievable without completely min-maxing everything
@@PointsofData ...that's the point? People are just finding these things decades later, keeping niche interests high.
@standard-carrier-wo-chan OP is talking about fostering socialization and community in Pokemon players. Nich, complicated mechanics that take decades for anyone to decipher doesn't do that. It frustrates the people currently playing who want to min max, and does nothing for the casuals currently playing who ignorantly stumble their way through. Complicated puzzles? Sure, there's a clear indication there's something wacky you're supposed to do so people can just talk about it. Complicated mechanics require people to sit and play through those mechanics over and over and over again to figure out and chart. You shouldn't have to do homework to be able to play a video game. It doesn't make people talk about those mechanics fondly, it makes them hate those mechanics.
29:58 oh boy I feel so called out. As a kid, after I managed to beat every Master Rank contest, I tried to get my favorite Umbreon to get every Ribbon in my Ruby cartridge, but I obviously knew nothing about the actual math, so I just tried to get the best Pokéblocks I could with the best berries I could get at the time - Spelon, Pamtre, Watmel, Durin and Belue.
As you can imagine, I couldn't max any of those 5 contest stats, so I basically had to nail the 2nd phase every time. Some of those contests were hellish, given Umbreon's somewhat limited movepool - God knows how many times I had to retry for some of those. I managed to do it in the end, and somehow I even had the gall to try it again on Gen 4 (it was even more brutal...)
Watching the video really made me miss contests, although I don't know if I'd be as invested as I was after knowing all the math and optimizations. I did enjoy experimenting with movesets and combos, but thinking about how much time it takes to get good berries and Pokéblocks... But well, putting in so much time into it was part of the fun. Thank you for the great video!
I’m sorry but the “ …
OH SHIT THE SAFARI ZONE”
Gets me every single time I rewatch this. The way you say it is so funny and I cannot explain. I love it. 10/10
I remember looking into the basics when these games first came out and going 'wow this is complicated'. Now, watching this video, it's more like 'WTF WHY DID THEY DO ALL THIS???' 😂
I am one of those people who went for all the ribbons. Of course when gen 3 was the current gen, I had no idea what I was doing, so I maxed sheen without reason and just used explosion on the last round to win.
Took a decade or something, but that Electrode finally has true maxed stats.
Unreal how ridiculously complex this all was.
imagine being a spectator of a pokemon contest and one of the contestants just has their pokemon kill itself in the last round via explosion
And freaking everyone loves it.
@@Boobo_000ngl, I want to read that fanfic.
@@Boobo_000 To be fair, in the Anime Brock's Pineco kept exploding on his trainer once an episode because it found it amusing. So I take it thatordering that move wouldn't be seen as quite such a negative thing, even though it should be very draining.
This is unironically one of my favorite vids I've watched in a while. I remembering being so hecking confused about pokeblocks back in the day, and it's nice to know I wasn't just dumb and it is actually just unreasonably complicated haha
Same !
Personally, the award for 'dear god why did they make this so complicated' goes to beefalo taming in Don't Starve. If you're interested in spiraling into insanity, James Bucket has a good video explaning it. The whole thing is ridiculous to the point that any interest I had in possibly having a beefalo mount was crushed permanently upon learning what the 'process' consists of
@@lzrshark617 Don't forget raising Chao in SA1 and 2. My lord...
Unlocking the Lost in The Binding of Isaac
the Beedrill at 1:30 being named Zubes was total whiplash for me, I've been using that as my go to Zubat name for years lol
zooby zooby zoo
Pubes
I’m surprised you even use Zubat at all, lol
@@frownyclowny6955 I finish the pokedex quite often, and Crobat is honestly not bad if you can get to it
@@frownyclowny6955 Zubat is honestly solid, it's just got a reputation of being terrible because it infests caves AND is commonly used by weak opponents (rocket grunts for exemple), making it look awful.
But poison/flying is a really solid typing and the pokemon is easy to get with some solid use cases. It's not the most busted thing you can get by a long shot but it's really not that hard to include in a team.
Both of these were very excellent videos; very thorough explanations, and good editing. And even more fuel to ensure that Masuda never, ever lives down the "Azure Flute was too complicated" quote.
My theory is that GameFreak has some sort of collaboration with an university and take interns from there to "bring something innovating", but interns can't change the core of the game, so we get these hyper complex, focused and niche mechanics as "skill tests"
Every Pokémon game has its gimmick. Or gimmicks. (Cries in hundreds of raid battles and Dynamax tournaments)
That...um...I don't want to be rude but...no. Interns are not having that large of an influence on a game, let alone a billion dollar franchise. The more likely culprit is a mixture of never having built something like [system name here] before, overthinking it, wanting to encourage the community working together at the expense of individual players fun, and crunch/deadlines preventing the mechanics from being fleshed out as much as they may have wanted.
I've been very comfortable with Evs, Ivs, natures, abilities, Types, what moves do, and on and on. I have no experience with any of this Pokeblock stuff and I am really glad to finally understand how complicated it can be and the ins and outs of the process. I want to know all there is to know about these childhood games. :)
i always find the names of the berries funny, they either only change 1 letter of the fruit/veggie it's based off of or just spell it backwards and call it a day
The Macho Brace is another case of "lets you mess with the intricate mechanics but doesn't actually tell you that". I used it in Ruby a lot because the description is like "The pokemon using this will grow faster, but with lower speed" and I thought that meant more exp. Turns out it's effort values.
Gamefreak is truly unique. Whether it's old or new Gamefreak: they got some mad genius coders working for them. Coders capable of hyper specific mechanics you don't think too much of. I really didn't think Pokeblocks were... this complicated.
There's certainly a lot of mad genius devs in there, all they really needed were some regular genius coders to make it work coherently.
Unfortunately all those coders are also probably mathematicians
It makes me so satisfied to hear how simple pokeblocks are in ORAS. I was getting stressed thinking about that earlier system.
I remember only one thing about the Pokeblock as kid. I always thought it was just a fruit blender that turns berries into pez candies. And the way that it needs more than 1 people to throw iin something is like a hotpot dinner but for your pokemon.
Hard to rewind for those nature-based animations on mobile, so I'm just putting these timecodes here for personal ease of access:
First batch: 45:55
Second batch: 45:59
Third batch: 46:04
Fourth batch: 46:10
Fifth batch: 46:17
You should be at the top, this would have saved me so much time
Loved how my first thought after hearing the Black Blocks stats was “and what if we get 0 sheen black blocks”
I don't like making you get into the contest side of the games, but I would really love a deep dive into how the move part of these contests work and what strategies are optimal.
I do have an idea for why most complex mechanics aren't directly explained to the player. Recent Pokemon games have been trying to walk the line between casual and competitive play, but they're likely aware that the majority of their players don't know what an effort value is and don't care/need to know. When it comes to casual play, randomness and unpredictability can be favored over the consistency that is valued in competitive play, so mechanics like EVs, IVs, natures, and more aren't fully explained because they give a degree of variance to everyone's Pokemon and make them all a little more unique. So when, as a random example, someone's Kricketune survives a Giga Impact from Cynthia's Garchomp, they don't have to think about the damage formula or what numbers had to align to make that possible, or the numerous more optimal things they could have done instead of letting a singing bug tank a land shark. They can just think "my Kricketune is the best". Items like the mints are there to give a wink and a nudge to the competitive players who'll know what they do and make their job of finely tuning their teams easier, while casual players probably won't be too confused by their simple descriptions.
I'm someone who's almost always in favor of the side content and minigames in the core Pokemon games, and I'd love to see Contests or something similar make a return. When the amount of content available in a game increases over time, I can understand the idea of simplifying parts of the mechanics so that the player doesn't have to spend as much time learning intricate details when there's other stuff to do. I imagine that Pokeblocks in Gen 3 were as esoteric as they were because they wanted to avoid people gaming the system and instead have players work with what they got. Given their rework in ORAS, I doubt they'd go back to something as complex again, but as long as there's still depth to the content that it's supporting (Contests are complex enough as it is, which is probably why they thought that Pokeblocks didn't need to be as complex), I'll probably still enjoy it.
I imagine the ‘Sheen’ stat being related to ‘fullness’ isn’t actually the idea. You’d assume a Pokémon gets to eat every day, it’s just that feeding a Pokémon a PokeBlock increases their “Sheen”. Whether that’s supposed to represent the shininess of their fur or how thick it is I don’t know (it’s definition is soft lustre, whatever the fuck that means). So you can feed them as much as you’d like but eventually their fur will shine a certain way and will never improve. I think Sheen is a good word to describe it actually
Thing is, it doesn't convey information very well at all.
It technically fits as a description of what's happening, but you'd never guess what it means mechanically without trial and error.
@@1stCallipostle yeah of course but that’s just Pokémon in a nutshell isn’t it
I feel like people are looking too deep into it. I think they wanted to use the stars to illustrate the amount of pokeblocks you could give and then went with "sheen" to describe it because it makes the pokemon shine. Nothing to do with hunger or their coat, purely describes the stars.
This has always been what I thought. "Sheen" or "Luster" is one of the criteria used to judge a dog's fur in dog show. It's pretty much how shiny it's coat is. Now, how that corresponds to stars and how many Pokeblocks...it still barely makes sense.
@@ettoresalvatore9437You don't understand how twinkly stars correspond to how shiny something is?
I remember 12 year old me wanting a Milotic so when I was looking into how to evolve it i went down the pokeblock hole a bit, and this reminds me so much of that time but in a much more in depth look than i could ever imagine
Not to mention the amount of time needed to find feebas. At least the tiles don't randomize in RSE unless you change the trendy saying.
I watched both your most recent videos when they randomly came up on my feed. I didn't notice the view count until I finished this one, and I am honestly dumbfounded. This is so well researched, scripted and edited that I just assumed it was from a large content creator. You deserve so much more. You've earned a sub, and I'll be sharing these videos with friends. Keep doing what you're doing and best of luck!
this exact statement for me but I'm bad with words
Yes
Quality doesn’t guarantee popularity
@@anananananananananananananana you've never clicked on a video about a topic you're not familiar/interested in just to learn?
@@anananananananananananananana what? there's a 7 hour comprehensive breakdown of pokemon omega ruby that has 2 million views
when you talked about black pokeblocks i just imagined an image of a pokemon drawn over the sad seal saying "he was force fed black pokeblocks when he was 6"
The way you breakdown info and your style of explaination is perfect man
Before going into said topic, you layout each step you want to accomplish
It's basically a brain-itch for my anxiety when approaching overwhelming information. Super digestible 😌. Thank you for the hard work.
Not going to lie, I'd love to see you do Pomeg Glitches in this style of video essay. I feel like they're not very well understood by anyone, and having someone actually do a deep-dive into what causes each variation and how it's useful (or otherwise) would be a really fun video. Who knows, maybe you'll get credited as the person who finds a brand-new Pomeg Glitch variation that revolutionizes speedrunning 👀
glitzer popping my beloved
Great video!
small editing suggestion: during overlays, when you darken the background footage, you should consider adding a blurred effect as well. As it is, it kinda felt like my phone was going into power saving mode.
Pokeblocks in gen 3 was such a complicated mechanic to get right when I was going for a ribbon master. I would love a Pokémon game all about contests lol
I love how the developers make all these complex and deep calculations while most of the kids playing just do what they think will work
Holy shit a Nakajima pfp out in the wild
Videogame science videos are soo much fun, and this one is great and had me fully engrossed! Thank you for showing me the crazy depths behind this minigame I playef like twice XD
Y'know your conclusion reminds me of probably my favourite aspect of scarlet and violet. The fact they made nature changing items and more especially EV training items items available early on is so cool. On each playthrough I basically just bench my starter in the early game just so I can EV train them later on, it's so much fun to actually be involved in your pokemon training process as early as before you even got your first badge. S/V have a lot of issues, but they still brought so much to the table.
this is a really great video but i cant overlook the fact that this guy's characters are named sexica and lustula (and sexio and bedmi..)
I really love games that have almost puzzle-like in-depth layers of mechanics and I wish more games were like that today. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but I love how these kinds of mechanic can really make a game feel alive with how tiny things make each player have a somewhat different experience.
Excellent video essay. Subscribed.
That's what I hate about the sandwiches in ScVi, they're not puzzles, they basically have to be calculated via computer because of how weird it is.
This would work well as long as you don't need to know every single part and mechanic of it to use it well
@@moppycat2669 Very true. Pokemon kinda hits that awkward spot where the competitive scene makes these mechanics look incredibly annoying to deal with (because they are in that case). It's a shame because future Pokemon games have just been trying to simplify more and more as they cater to a younger audience and the competitive scene (to a limited extent).
“It won’t eat anymore”
(Dramatic zoom, dark echo) “I missed the part where that was my problem, Cacturne”
I checked your channel after watching this and was surprised to see that you only had a couple of video essay style stuff like this. This was super thorough and well structured and really enjoyable to watch! I hope you do more of this type of videos in the future!
This awakened something in me. I just scrambled to buy a nutpea berry card from eBay. I have my original hardware, game, and e-reader ready to go. I've played Ruby/Sapphire since they came out, but never got good at the contests. I think I am finally going to go for that all ribbon Scizor I've been dreaming about.
You better have a Scyther from XD
It has one extra exclusive Ribbon
@@anonanonymous9670 Correct
@@Jeffeffery9 That's good to hear
Shadow Golduck is yet another fantastic Ribbon Pokemon due to being in EVERY single Pokemon game
There's actually no way of telling if Scyther shares the same fate since Golduck's pre-evolution is Masuda's favorite but so far it's very very good too
The cool thing about the card berries is that neither the E-reader nor the card are used up, so you can share across all 4 copies.
Excited to be in on the ground floor of a well-produced essay channel! Honestly the bizarre intricacies of gen 3 being incomprehensible to child-me and hoping the internet could help me back when it was still novel is a good chunk of what endeared me to the series in the first place, so it's great to see an explanation like this (I had no clue what the secondary colors meant, really). It might be cool to see a deep dive on something like how pokerus generates or the battle facilities over the years. If you're looking for more (relatively) obscure, FRLG probably has some good material
I tried to do my own research on this a few months ago because I needed to talk about it and I could not understand a lot of it. This video is amazing and it broke down so much stuff in a very neat and interesting way. This is some amazing work here. Like seriously well done!
An insanely well done, produced, and presented video. I really appreciate the documentation of mechanics and intricacies that many people have either not thought about, or have been unable to look into/understand.
I like how throughout you critique how needlessly complicated or obtuse these mechanics can get. 8 year old me felt very seen
It's wild that there was no way to reset stats and start feeding pokeblocks all over again, I remember fumbling around with making berries and being stuck with a feebas not beautiful enough to evolve. Great work on the video, I had never heard of the e reader berries before so that was neat.
Pokemon contests make you really appreciate the ability to pass food after you've eaten it.
"...[T]here's clearly a desire to learn about this sort of thing"
My guy, I am here as if I am attending a glass-bottom boat tour, waiting for the moment when the dropoff / shipwreck comes into view, to listen to the tour guide explains it, all the while I am latched onto the safety rails as if there were even a chance I was going to fall into these nighmarish depths. This was horrifying. Thank you for this tour.
I don't know why hearing Z10 Briefing out of nowhere brought me so much joy, but you have brought a smile to my face good sir. BLADE needs more people like you.
This is one of the most entertaining pokemon videos I’ve watched in a while. Easily as good as someone like Absolblogs or Johnstone. Also the music was killer
Fr it was really cool !
As I was watching the video I was thinking "Gosh that seemed like a nightmare" then when ORAS was brought up, and I remembered how simple it was in those games I began to think that, maybe I preferred the old way? Sure it was tedious but at least it was interesting.
Also as a potential deep dive what about the decline of event Pokémon? How it went from fun quests like Celebi in Crystal or Shaymin in Platinum to just codes for shiny legendaries that they shiny-locked for the sake of exclusivity.
I was literally just talking to a friend about this. The last time I went to a Nintendo Event was for platinum. Toys R Us for the event regigigas, and GameStop for the Member’s Card
Eh, as a player who started in gen 6 and revisited the older games, there's certain tedious things that feel rewarding, and some that just.. suck.
This.. is the latter. Mainly due to Milotic imo, as I never found contests interesting.
I think Super Training was honestly the best example of a mini game that helps your Pokemon out in the series so far. (not counting spinoffs)
I’m gonna hard disagree with that. These sorts of systems that are unnecessarily complicated for 0 good reason can absolutely be worse than those that are simply and a tad boring. Would I prefer some of the earlier game’s systems? Sure, the minigame was fun, and I liked maxing out stats for contests. But so much of the process is obscured, and without ways to reverse progress, or at least sheen-lowering berries, it feels like the game is punishing me. Instead of being neutral and boring, it feels actively bad.
Screw event pokemon. I hate event pokemon. The new system is an improvement. It's nice that "mythicals" are inside the game the entire time and you don't need to be in the right place at the right time IN REAL LIFE to unlock the quest.
Remember that in America, Marshadow was distributed ONCE ever. Marshadow and Volcanion are now completely purely unobtainable.
I'd rather them be shinylocked but obtainable than "from now on only hackers can dream of obtaining these"
@@shybandit521
And most of those quest, if any ever did, never make it to the rest of america, they're only fun for the US and Canada, I much prefer a code everyone can get than being locked from something so the US can have more fun.
Can we appreciate that the spinda used to show the quirky eating animation is nicknamed "Quirked up"?
deep dive videos for niche video game content like this are my absolute cup of tea, i really enjoyed the video and the effort you put into researching for it. while i don’t think it’s nearly as complicated as pokeblocks, i’d love to see something about hgss’s pokeathlon.
54:00 Gotta love how there's a franchise that adds stuff like this, _never_ explains how _any_ of it works, but the fans still find ways to learn it and share on their own.
(Not that I wouldn't prefer the games say at least something, but at least it does get learned.)
As someone who has always loved and adored contests...THANK YOU FOR EXPLAINING THIS STUFF qvq My brain can barely comprehend all the calculations I'll have to do anyway, but man. man! Little me was always baffled whenever I suddenly couldn't feed my pokemon anymore. Even to this day, I still get the Desire to do more contest stuff, and having this info in mind will hopefully help me strategize better rather than just going, "wow, that sure is a number!", and hoping for the best--
I am conflicted on the ORAS version of contests. On one hand, they're still pretty fun, and I went up to Master rank way easier than I ever got anywhere in the og contests, but on the other I was genuinely really looking forward to the return of the pokeblock mini-game with easier-to-access berries. Which I guess kinda sums up a thought I just got whilst typing this; between the simplification of contests and outright removal of the beloved Battle Frontier to be left with a "to be made :3" sign...it feels like there was both a lot of love and effort were put into ORAS and at the same time there was some kind of genuine disdain for anyone who genuinely wanted to do side stuff. I feel like the only thing that kept contests intact in the slightest was that they were so prominent in Ruby and Sapphire, and they could add a cute alternate pikachu to it. (Which, to be fair, I love that pikachu.)
I was never a fan of the Battle Frontier, but even I felt like I got personally slapped in the face seeing that sign.
(And then BDSP went and completely gutted the contests............)
I'm definitely a fan of making things more accessible and perhaps not SO complicated you need to actually stare at the code and then do days or longer of research to understand it, but nnot so much where the games have decided "ain't nobody got time for that anyway", and just...leaves everything in the dust if they can't fit it into a nice and neat 10-20min max of added playtime, and god forbid they have to explain something other than the absolute base mechanics...
To end on a much happier note, though!
I did not realize there were different feeding animations for different natures. I absolutely adore little touches like that ;;w;; oh my gosh
you could do a video covering a bunch of minor things, like the gold leaves in HGSS, the fact you can increase happiness of pokemon in some games by training them in the route you catch them in. You know, things that aren't worth a full video on their own.
Or maybe you could do the HGSS Safari Zone, but that's not as complicated as it seems afaik, it just requires a lot of waiting.
What?
Wait, pokémon are happier in their home routes?! That makes me feel a little guilty... like they're homesick.
I love video essays about obscure Pokemon info, and I feel like I just hit the jackpot today. Keep up the great work man!
This is quality I would expect from a channel with over ten times your subscriber count! Amazing video.
Almost 1 year later this shows up again in my recommended. Am I going to sit through the entire video completely enthralled yet again? Absolutely.
RUclips recommended you to me and this was the first video I watched of yours.
Holy crap, I never actually knew how the Safari Zone and Pokeblocks worked until this.
Thank you.
Underrated stuff dude, it's cool seeing someone go in-depth on mechanics I completely missed as a kid. Keep up the good work man!
PokeBlock?? What is this? Minecraft??
Sued
No, they're supposed to fruit based snacks for Pokemon made out of barries
For the record, I get it's a joke. But, it's a BAD one
I honestly thought it was some sort of Pokéball Blocker.
@@shelbybayer200 who made you the joke police?
No, Pixelmon
The oras games are really bizarre when it comes to probability in general, not just for pokeblocks. To this day, the dexnav odds are still not fully understood, despite the fact that they would be really useful for shiny hunting and getting hidden abilities; for a while, we didn't even know if cresselia was random, and I'm fairly certain the odds are still completely undocumented. I'd honestly love to see someone make a video on this problem and what causes it
That "OH SHIT THE SAFARI ZONE" genuinely gave me a jumpscare lol
So, I saw this one video while scrolling through my recommended tab and thought "An one hour long video on Pokéblocks? Who in the world watches that stuff? Only to realize, as a complete Pokéblock/Poffin nutcase, that that person is me! The production quality of this video was beyond excellent! I was very surprised to see that this seems to be the first video of you to take off. Even though I knew almost everything about the stuff about the stats of Pokéblocks, the video was so well-made and compellingly written I just had to watch it all! Despite having spent dozens of hours researching Pokéblocks throughout the years, there was some stuff in this video I didn't even know about, really cool! Keep up the gooď work man! Really great video!
Do something that makes me money: Nah
Watch an hour long video on an obscure 20 year old game mechanic: HELL YEAH
Just gotta say, for all the effort that went into this video, you deserve waaaaaay more subscribers than you have. Super high quality video essay! Also “OH SHIT THE SAFARI ZONE” killed me lmao
Everything in this video is explained in a crystal clear manner, the editing is on point and the effort you put in is more than evident. Thanks for your hard work, you honestly deserve much more.
What made me ask more questions is :
Why your players names are "Lustula" "Sexica" "Sexio" and "Bedmi"
Some part of me wishes they kept the old system because as a kid, it just made sense that pokemon would like certain flavours more than others. As far back as the first guide book, the idea that each individual pokemon is different (yes, the first RBY guidebook I had had a screenshot talking about stat differences, even if they didn't outright say, hey, look, DVs!) was a thing. So it made sense. Heck, I even eventually noticed certain correlations, because I played the games way too much as a kid. Even the idea that pokemon eventually get full made sense (even if it would have made MORE sense if that fullness reset eventually). You know, as "living beings that you sorta but not quite understand". The fact that there's a ridiculous amount of stuff under the hood, is cool. In games like the Dragon Warrior Monsters titles with its personality values, I like it just as much.
But, I understand why they simplified it - it just makes sense if they wanted to go much more child-focused, as they did over the years. I just kind of wish they tried to incorporate it more visibly yet still organically. That would add so much to the mons personality-wise while actually explaining things. Again with the Dragon Warrior Monsters example: in that game, an NPC just tells you "It's easier to nurture monsters, when they are young" and it's enough for you to know that their personality changes easier if you give commands at low levels, because you can observe that. It made monsters so life-like while making the mechanic visible.
In any case, my rambling aside, this was a really cool deepdive. Very well presented too. I enjoyed it a lot!
More childish over the years? Ash is a 10 year old boy. The player character in all games is 10. The games have always been and continue to be made for 10 year olds.
First off, child-focused and childish are two very different words with very different meanings. I used one over the other on purpose.
Second, how much you focus on a certain target audience is on a scale and can change over time. Oftentimes, a new franchise might look at its metrics and really zero in on the most profitable group, even if they were more scattershot before. You are correct in that Ash being 10 is a decent indicator of target audience, but other things, like the large amount of behind-the-scenes stuff that can be interesting, some more mature jokes and even just stuff like the Pokemon Tower actually dealing with matters of blood and death (the Channeler dialogues, but also NPCs) tell me that their amount of focus on certain groups definitely shifted. I don't even blame them - 10-year olds are a fast regrowing impressionable audience (as crude as that sounds) and their parents (who likely grew up on Pokemon) don't need to be direactly adressed to still buy into it. It just makes sense.
Absolutely fantastic video. Old Pokemon games really were stuffed to the brim with mechanics.
This reminds me of Cybershell's Chao video. I absolutely love lengthy breakdowns of deceptively simple side mechanics in games that usually never get much thought.
Good to see this video is taking off. You definitely deserve it, you're as detailed as Bulbapedia
About the Gen 3's lack of info about natures, there is one guy in a house in Slateport who says, "My Pokemon has a HASTY nature. It has higher SPEED compared to my other Pokemon. Maybe their nature has something to do with the stat gains of Pokemon." I can't remember if this was in R/S or if Gen 3 says anything else on natures, but it does at least give a hint.
My conspiracy brain believes that the Pokemon Company deliberately obfuscated information back in the old days WHILE adding mechanics that required the use of that information, all to encourage players to purchase special guidebooks with more in-depth info. After all, any "official" guide likely had to pay for a license to use the Pokemon IP, or the publisher would even have to establish a contract to pay Pokemon a commission for every copy sold. Around Gen 4, the internet really took off as a free means to find this in-depth information, so Pokemon probably saw no reason to provide more than cursory hints and items since they knew curious players were likely going to compile, search, and find that stuff online anyway.