If you’ve played any recent Pokemon game, you’ll know thatthe main series is in a bad place. There’s a long way to go before it’s technically up to scratch, but I want more interesting stories and mechanics as well as a bug-free product for my money.
There are many things thatGame Freakand The Pokemon Company could do to improve things, and taking their time, spending five years or so making the next mainline entry would be my number one priority. However,Pokemonis far more than its games now, and it has plushies to sell, cards to trade, and TV series to continue. The pace of new games simply cannot let up, and that’s why we need a reinvention.
Whether that’s theHD-2D game I’ve long dreamed of, or something that’s never even come across our tiny brains, I don’t care, but something needs to be done differently. However, the most important factor in any new Pokemon game is that it needs to get the fans back onside.
No, I’m not talking about anew Eeveelution, although Drakeon would go down a storm. I’m talking about Hard Mode.
It’s been done before. You could unlock Challenge Mode inPokemon Black 2 & White 2after completing the game, which increases the levels of trainer Pokemon, gives many of them powerful held items, increases the potency of the game’s AI, and adds an extra Pokemon to Gym Leader teams. There’s room for improvement, but it’s a start.
Pokemon Scarlet & Violet’slatest DLC, the Indigo Disk, also adds a pretty gnarly difficulty spike. Most of it is just arbitrary level increases to force you to grind, but each member of the Elite Four also has a nifty trick up their sleeves. Take Lacey, the Fairy-type trainer. She packs five Fairy-types (obviously) and Excadrill, who Terastalises into a Fairy-type.
Excadrill is a perfect addition to Lacey’s team. It checks the Steel- and Poison-types that would otherwise wreck her team, while having those weaknesses itself. Despite those weaknesses, Excadrill is Excadrill and therefore outspeeds most opponents, hitting them with huge attacks before they can get a hit off. It’s one slight change to the monotype Gym formula that makes you think about battles for a second, rather than blindly mashing ‘A’ for the entirety of the game.
Pokemon needs to go a step further in Gen 10, and implement a full hard mode for the older gamers who grew up with the series and fall asleep when faced with the (lack of) challenge in modern games. That’s why we do Nuzlockes and enforce extra rules to make things more difficult. It’s why Kaizo games and ROM hacks like Radical Red exist.
I’m not expecting Pokemon to implement a Nuzlocke modelike competitor TemTem did, but a ruleset by any other name would smell as sweet. I want set battle style back, I want Gym Leaders to have six Pokemon and interesting synergies, and I want the option to make my fainted Pokemon unusable going forward. In a perfect world, more battles would be 2v2, the more tactical style employed by competitive VGC tournaments.
If you look at what Pokemon fans are watching on YouTube and Twitch, challenge runs are thriving. Whether they’re Nuzlockes, Cagelockes, Soul Links, or any other spin on the formula, collaborative Let’s Plays are raking in thousands of views.Incredibly challenging ROM hacksperform even better, taking on analmost roguelike statusas streamers take them on time and time again to get a little further on each run. The hardest of these are played with open team sheets and easy methods to change EVs and IVs because they’re justthat hard. I don’t propose Pokemon goes that far officially, but meeting fans halfway would be a happy medium.
Most of all, we want options. The option to make boss battles hard again, to make the average trainer on a route a challenge in themselves, to make Pokemon battles a game of strategy like they were of old. We want the option to turn on Hard Mode, and for official Pokemon games to offer the same excitement as fangames have managed over the past couple of years.
