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Making my way ever onward
May. 3rd, 2007 10:25 pmContinuing merrily along in Diamond. In good Chocobo-style RPG playing, rather than make my way through the cave to the third lake, I've been collecting unown, growing berries, raising pokemon, embarking on sidequests, and just caught a gible.
Also managed two simultaneous evolutions, followed by a third evolution fighting the next wild pokemon I ran into because Nintendo likes to have pokemon evolve at the same general number range. (Was the world really crying out for an aipom evolution, though?) Which was great except it happened midway through Wayward Cave, and as I'm already carrying around a golbat I'm not battling with, that left me two battling pokemon and a stupid kadabra that thought kinesis is a valid battle contribution. WTF, Nintendo? Would putting an actual AI in there prevent you from miniaturizing the cartridge sliver down to the very useful size of "completely losable"?
So anyway, I just replaced a third of my team - with a L15 fin fish thing and a L22 drifoom. I'm not so much holding steady as falling merrily back in my goal of having a strong enough team to get through the cave.
I managed to figure out my exact problem with the pokemon designs.
Okay. RBY. They're pretty much stylized animals, not anthropomorphic in the least except for the really weird object ones that get faced. They have a somewhat streamlined anime type design, but not excessively, and they're close to the animals they resemble, but not too much. They're marginally more cuddly than their originals, but not outright cute, and even the round body ones have a "I will fuck you up" vibe - yes, exeggcute are a bunch of eggs. But they are scowling at you with hate.
GSC is heading more into cuddly, rounded - look at sentret and hoothoot, both found one after another, both roundbodied. They're more distinct from their animal bases, but a lot of them are kinda eh all the same - a lot of normal types running through the animals that weren't addressed in the first game, like bears and owls, and there's a sort of realistic tinge - normal/bug.
RSE heads into sort of a modernist hypersteamlined look, with a few exceptions - zigzagoon is much less stylized than pretty much any pokemon. But salamence? It's assembled out of cut plastic by one of those sculptors who's overpaid because no one can figure out what it means. They're mostly weird looking.
DP is a mix of all the ones from the past three generations that got left on the cutting room floor, mixed in with random filler. There are your ridiculous cutesy anthropomorphized objects - chingling is a bell that has a face. The originality stuns. (And seriously, Nintendo, did we need a literal balloon pokemon?) There are your "my eleven year old son thought it was hilarious" jokes - stunky. There are your rehashes of rehashes of rehashes - starly is pretty much assembled from sawed off chunks of the last three opening normal/flying types. The game is peppered with okay pokemon mixed with more questionable ones - Piplip looks like a pokemon. Torterra looks like that Lion King boss you fight in KH2. The monkey needs to die. Once I finish the game and get a full dex I'll be able to get a better estimate on the real/filler ratio, but I suppose it's workable just based on total numbers since you can just ignore ones you don't like.
Also managed two simultaneous evolutions, followed by a third evolution fighting the next wild pokemon I ran into because Nintendo likes to have pokemon evolve at the same general number range. (Was the world really crying out for an aipom evolution, though?) Which was great except it happened midway through Wayward Cave, and as I'm already carrying around a golbat I'm not battling with, that left me two battling pokemon and a stupid kadabra that thought kinesis is a valid battle contribution. WTF, Nintendo? Would putting an actual AI in there prevent you from miniaturizing the cartridge sliver down to the very useful size of "completely losable"?
So anyway, I just replaced a third of my team - with a L15 fin fish thing and a L22 drifoom. I'm not so much holding steady as falling merrily back in my goal of having a strong enough team to get through the cave.
I managed to figure out my exact problem with the pokemon designs.
Okay. RBY. They're pretty much stylized animals, not anthropomorphic in the least except for the really weird object ones that get faced. They have a somewhat streamlined anime type design, but not excessively, and they're close to the animals they resemble, but not too much. They're marginally more cuddly than their originals, but not outright cute, and even the round body ones have a "I will fuck you up" vibe - yes, exeggcute are a bunch of eggs. But they are scowling at you with hate.
GSC is heading more into cuddly, rounded - look at sentret and hoothoot, both found one after another, both roundbodied. They're more distinct from their animal bases, but a lot of them are kinda eh all the same - a lot of normal types running through the animals that weren't addressed in the first game, like bears and owls, and there's a sort of realistic tinge - normal/bug.
RSE heads into sort of a modernist hypersteamlined look, with a few exceptions - zigzagoon is much less stylized than pretty much any pokemon. But salamence? It's assembled out of cut plastic by one of those sculptors who's overpaid because no one can figure out what it means. They're mostly weird looking.
DP is a mix of all the ones from the past three generations that got left on the cutting room floor, mixed in with random filler. There are your ridiculous cutesy anthropomorphized objects - chingling is a bell that has a face. The originality stuns. (And seriously, Nintendo, did we need a literal balloon pokemon?) There are your "my eleven year old son thought it was hilarious" jokes - stunky. There are your rehashes of rehashes of rehashes - starly is pretty much assembled from sawed off chunks of the last three opening normal/flying types. The game is peppered with okay pokemon mixed with more questionable ones - Piplip looks like a pokemon. Torterra looks like that Lion King boss you fight in KH2. The monkey needs to die. Once I finish the game and get a full dex I'll be able to get a better estimate on the real/filler ratio, but I suppose it's workable just based on total numbers since you can just ignore ones you don't like.
