What is to be done with Pokémon?

So, I finally finished Pokémon Scarlet. Took me a while I know, but I didn’t get the game until Christmas and have been playing it on and off since then while doing other things as well. And given I spent Christmas away I couldn’t properly get into it until I got home. So yeah, took my time beating this one.

My initial plan for when I completed it was to do a proper review of it, but I decided against that. Partly because I’m working on something else I need to finish, look forward to that in the coming days, and because I wanted to do something a little different.

If you want my thoughts on the game though, I really liked. I enjoyed a lot of the new Pokémon designs, the story and writing were the best they’ve been in a long time and the open world exploration was the breath of fresh sir this series has been in desperate need of since the DS era.

The games, Scarlet and Violet, are good. It’s just a shame then that they’re buggier than Viridian Forest. To say these games launched in sub-optimal conditions would be putting it lightly. From poor textures, weak draw distance and frame rate so bad even the credits chug like a doped-up frat boys, Scarlet and Violet have more issues than Detective Comics.

Scarlet and Violet are technical nightmares which undermines the fact that these are the most ambitious Pokémon games in a very long time. And it’s this dichotomy that forms the backbone of what I want to talk about. I could just review Scarlet and be done with it, but I would be missing the larger conversation regarding the series that needs to be had.

Pokémon has been in a very weird position for a while now. It is by some considerable margin the biggest franchise on earth in terms of raw profitability. From video games, to anime, to trading cards, and a veritable ocean of plush, the Pokémon series prints more money per day than the national treasury does in a week.

And yet despite this, the games themselves were never treated as big budget AAA releases. Keep in mind that until the Nintendo Switch, Pokémon was predominately a handheld only series. It had entries on home console, but these were either spin off game’s ala Pokémon Snap, or were simply methods of battling Pokémon in 3D with the Stadium and Coliseum games.

The main series always stuck to the handheld. It was only because Nintendo combined their handheld and console divisions with the Switch that has forced them into the home console space.

This has presented a bit of a problem for Game Freak, the developers behind Pokémon. Game Freak is not a large studio, intentionally so. Junichi Masuda who has been at Game Freak since its early days has outright said that he prefers to keep teams small to have better communication between them.

Nothing wrong with that. There is the old statement that too many cooks spoil the broth. I would argue one of the reasons that Ubisoft and EA almost always seem to end up with a metric shit ton of glitches is largely due to the absurd size of the teams developing them.

Hell, bloated staff in any industry often leads to mismanagement and lulls in productivity. Why do you think tech companies have had massive layoffs recently. Too many cooks are n their kitchen, and the broth is most assuredly being spoiled.

I understand wanting to keep teams small. Especially when you consider that Game Freak has always been this way and is likely to be used to that kind of environment. But when you consider the state that Scarlet and Violet released in, it’s not hard to realise that Game Freak may have reached a limit in what a small team can accomplish.

Want a non-Pokémon related example, look at No Man’s Sky when that launched. That was a hugely ambitious project from an even smaller team that didn’t come close to matching it’s promises at launch. Yes, it is much better now, but only after years of dedicated work updating the thing.

Having a small team is great when working on smaller titles. And that is what Pokémon was for a long time. But now that they’re going in this grander direction, you need to have the team size to back it up. Especially when you aren’t afforded much time to work on them.

One of the problems with Pokémon being such a massive franchise, is that there is a constant need for new product. Pokémon isn’t just a video game, it’s a franchise that spans multiple forms of media, along with a fuck ton of merchandise. All of which requires a new game to come out with new Pokémon designs and concepts so they can continue to make new product.

This has led to the recent Pokémon release schedule of releasing a new game every year. You can see the problem right. You have a small team that doesn’t want to expand, and a release schedule that doesn’t give them the time needed to properly polish their releases without crunching them to hell and back.

This has gotten so bad that Game freak have been forced to make some hard cuts in recent games. Those who remember the lead up to Sword and Shield will know the shitstorm that kicked off when it was revealed during Nintendo’s E3 Treehouse event that they would be cutting the National Dex. Meaning that you would be unable to transfer Pokémon from older generations unless they were already in the region.

The excuse Game Freak proffered was that this was done to improve on the graphics. An argument which immediately falls apart when you actually look at the fucking thing. Even before release fans were pointing out that the models for the Pokémon were reused from the 3DS games. Something that Game Freak had planned on given that the models were designed specifically to be reused in future instalments.

The far more likely reason this was done was simply to cut down on coding. Keep in mind that every Pokémon has their own separate code, and with there now being over 1000 of them with their own types, moves and weaknesses to program, that’s a lot of coding required for a small team.

That’s not counting items Pokémon can hold and the various moves they can learn. Both of which also received cuts of their own by the by.

And honestly, this is something that should have happened years ago. As each generation introduced more and more Pokémon, at some point Game Freak should have realised that it was unrealistic for them to code in every single one.

I’m not a game developer so take what I’m saying with a side of salt, but I’d imagine you couldn’t simply copy and paste code between games and be done with it. It must be more complicated than that. So, even if they reused assets it would only have helped so much

This was a band aid that should have been ripped off in the DS era. Maybe Game Freak felt like they had to keep it on since Nintendo handhelds were big on backwards compatibility so they didn’t have an excuse not to. I don’t know the exact reason why, but they kept the band aid on which resulted in a much large backlash when they finally ripped it off.

It’s easy to look at the current state of Pokémon and blame it on recent developments, but truth be told the series has suffered from a myriad of issues that go back to the beginning. I would argue that Game Freak stubbornly sticking to the exact same formula for years without any real innovation stagnated development of the series for years.

It’s nice to see with Scarlet and Violet are trying something new, but it’s also obvious there are some growing pains with the new direction. Something that wouldn’t have happened if they had innovated far earlier.

Working on the same game over and over can be draining even to the most dedicated. Some series are able to weather through this well. Kirby is a good example of this because Hal are allowed to experiment with him and try something new.

Game Freak should have allowed the same thing for Pokémon. I know it’s best to not fix what isn’t broken, but even functioning things need a good shake every now and then to get the gears turning.

So you know why Pokémon is in the state it’s in, as well as some of the things that may have lead up to it, but let’s circle it back to the title. What is to actually be done about it? Well, I hate to say it, but there’s no easy fix to this.

There are some obvious things that could be done like giving the developers more time or increasing the size of the development team. But these aren’t perfect solutions. The former because there are simply to many entities involved to allow that to happen, and the latter because there’s not only opposition to the idea within Game Freak but increasing team sizes comes with its own litany of issues.

And no, I don’t think we should just take Pokémon away from Game Freak and hand it off to another developer. I’ve seen this argument being bandied around online and frankly it’s ridiculous. Not only is it unfair to take the series away from it’s original creators, but frankly handing off franchises off to another developer doesn’t always work out.

There are numerous across gaming of franchises losing their original developers and turning to shit in the aftermath. Half of all of Sony’s franchises suffered that same fate, and Christ just look what happened to Halo when 343 took over.

That said I do think there is a way to aid Game Freak with development by allowing other studios to work on the series alongside them. Which is something they’re already working on. The Diamond and Pear remakes were both handled by ILCA, which allowed Game Freak time to work on the main series.

But while that is something they’re working on; they still need to be more open at allowing help from other studios. One of the reasons why Scarlet and Violet ended up the way they did was because Game Freak were also working on Legends Arceus at the same time. It even released the same year.

Working on 2 open world games at the same time was always going to be a struggle, even with a larger team. It would have been in Game Freak’s best interest to let another studio work on Arceus, to free up manpower that would aid in the development of Scarlet and Violet.

But here’s another thing, why work on 2 major projects at the same time anyway. If you’re going to release a new Pokémon every year, then you obviously can’t expect them all to major releases. Especially not when you’re going for a more ambitious scope like Scarlet and Violet.

If that’s the case, why not do more spin-offs. There are a ton of Pokémon spin-offs released over the years and a lot of them have been pretty good. The Mystery Dungeon games are fun, Pokken Tournament was great, and I heard great things about New Pokémon Snap. So why not do more of them? It would be a great way to get a new game out every year, and they would be smaller in scale, so they’d be able to get them out faster.

Hell, there are plenty of other spin-off games that could use a new entry. Remember that Pokémon strategy game on DS that was a cross-over with Nobunaga’s Ambition? Pokémon Conquest it was called. That was great, why not do another one.

When you think about it, there’s a lot of different genres Pokémon would work well with that they don’t do enough with. Strategy is one of them, but why not also try an Action RPG, or another fighting game, or hell why not try a Musou game? Other Nintendo properties got the treatment after all. Let’s give Pokémon a shot at it.

And if you’re worried about them not introducing new Pokémon with them, here’s a thought, just design new Pokémon for the spin offs. Pokémon Go did it with Melmetal. Allowing the spin-offs to have their own Pokémon could not only work as a preview for the upcoming main games it could also allow an opportunity for other designers to add their own unique flair to Pokémon designs.

I love Ken Sugimori’s designs, but even with the help he’s received with the newer games, it’s obvious we need some fresh blood when it comes to Pokémon designs. I mean look at this thing.

That is literally just a flamingo. It doesn’t look like a Pokémon it looks like a flamingo with a knot in its neck. Did you even try with this one?

But doing more spin-offs wouldn’t necessarily fix the issues surrounding Pokémon as a series. Honestly, doing more of them might result in an oversaturation of the brand. Really the only solution I can think of would be to simply take their time with each release, but as we’ve been over that isn’t likely to happen.

I think Pokémon is really a victim of its own success. It has always been a smaller scale RPG. That’s how it started and that’s how Game Freak wants to keep it. But with it being the most successful multimedia franchise on the planet, this creates an expectation for it that the developers are struggling to meet.

So, what is to be done with Pokémon? Honestly, I don’t really know. There are certainly options available, but none of them provide a permanent solution. What I think Pokémon needs is to actually stop being successful, or at least not as successful as it has become.

Think about it, if it stops being as big as it is, then there’s no expectation for it to go as big as people want. That way Game Freak can go back to making the small-scale games they’re best at making without worrying about the pressures of delivering new product every year. That does mean less Pokémon games, but it also means they have more time to make sure they’re as good as possible, and it makes it more special when they do release.

But with Pokémon being this unstoppable sales juggernaut rampaging through everything in its path, this may not happen until it careens headlong off a cliff into irrelevancy. Nothing short of a cataclysmic fuck up can stop them now.

And what can we do about it? Nothing at all. The only thing we can do is simply not purchase the games, and let’s be honest, we lose out as well when we choose not to engage with a series we love. If you still love Pokémon, then you should still support. Far be it from me from stopping you from having fun.

Pokémon won’t be on top forever. Everything has peaks and valleys of popularity. Even Pokémon itself had a dull spot in the late 2000’s. Its hype will eventually die down and something else will inevitably take its place.

When that happens is anyone’s guess. Hell, given the cross-generational appeal of Pokémon it may not happen at all. I’m old enough to remember when Pokémon first came out and now my nephew loves it to. It’s one of those franchises that always reaches a new generation of kids.

I don’t think there’s anything we can do about Pokémon. It will keep going and going until the tracks stop. The only thing we can do is play the games and voice our criticisms in a constructive way. Far too much of the discussion devolves into toxic name calling that helps no one. That’s something WE could certainly improve on.

Whatever happens I am going to continue to play Pokémon. I still enjoy the games and think the new direction has promise. It needs some ironing out, a lot of ironing out, but the potential is there. Hopefully Game Freak will learn something from Scarlet and Violet’s launch and improve things for next time. Probably not, but you always have to hope.