One of the difficult balances that the Pokemon Company and Game Freak have to get right is the balance between appealing to both newcomers to the franchise and the game’s long term fans. Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda was recently interviewed about this very issue in the latest edition of UK publication Games Master and here’s what he had to say.
“Today you will see ’90s kids who played the first Pokémon games, who are now parents playing with their children. But some of the core gameplay elements simply appeal as much now as they did in 1996. The collectable elements of the game still appeal to people’s sense of achievement, and it’s great for strategic thinking.
“You have to make accurate judgements about what to change and what not to change. It is also about not making things too difficult. After two or three generations, games have a tendency to become more difficult. In recent titles, catching Pokémon by throwing PokéBalls is explained in-game, but we also make a point of trying to get into the heads of children who have picked up a Pokémon game for the very first time in order to better understand how the games feel to a first-time audience.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5hx5rvLUN8 here is a trailer gor the new yu gi oh movie
Nice, thanks for sharing.
for*
Difficulty can be solved by adding in a hard mode for veteran Pokemon players.
They had that in Pokemon black and white but got removed in Pokemon X and Y
The story of the franchise in a nutshell.
Sadly.
“Let’s add this cool feature!”
“Sweet! Let’s do it!”
*next Pokemon gen comes around*
“Let’s remove a feature we added in a previous gen that everyone loved!”
“Sweet! Let’s do it!”
<.< I wonder if Mega Evolutions will be next. I hope not. I'm sick of cool features being removed from the next iterations.
IIRC, Black version was the only one that had the hard mode.
White version had easy mode.
They really need to implement nuzlocke as an official game mode while they’re at it. Take a few cues from Intelligent Systems and that. I guess they might want to avoid it because it’s designed around Pokémon actually dying, but they could swap that with another excuse to have your Pokémon leaving.
Maybe that the Pokemon leave because you let him faint
That might come across as too petty. Something like reverting to savage state might work. Maybe make it so happiness influences if they leave or not.
I’m not a fan of the whole nuzlocke thing, but I can understand the appeal that it has to people.
I’d be happy with a hard mode, but I hate how it was done in Black and White. I don’t want to have to play for 50+ hours then start from the beginning again. Hard mode should be an option from the start, as well as an option to remove the annoying highlighting of certain words in sentences because kids these days can’t think for themselves. I enjoyed ORAS, but the highlighting got really patronising by the end of the Delta Episode.
The whole tutorial experience in Pokemon should be optional by now. Just about everyone that plays knows what to do.
I love Omega Ruby to death, but you’re right about those damn highlights :].
I don’t actually have a problem with the first town tutorials. At least they have story relevance. There’s a couple of tutorials later in the games which annoy me though, especially if I’ve already used the technique before I’m ‘taught’ it. While I hate it in ORAS, I’d like to have highlighted speech in real life. My language can be colourful, but it cannot be bright blue.
“After two or three generations, games have a tendency to become more difficult.”
Except they have gone in the completely opposite direction. They’ve made the games an overly increasingly amount easier for newcomers, which is fine, but you’ve removed everything that players looking for a challenge were looking for. Could’ve brought back the Battle Frontier for ORAS but they didn’t, could’ve kept the harder difficulty from B2W2 but they didn’t. XY barely even had an end game. Don’t get me wrong I’m looking forward to Sun & Moon but we cannot have another gen with the same mindset as 6’s with end game and challenge.
TL;DR version. The balance isn’t hard, stop making new games without the challenging aspects of previous ones.
Ironically, the harder points of the early games were hard due to a lack of balancing. Especially in RBY’s case.
Nevetherless, this franchise has never been the epitome of challenge.
I 100% agree.
-||Why can’t every game have the intensity difficulty Kid Icarus Uprising has?||-
-||Sir Sakurai sure did create something solid there||-
As long as certain costumes or weapons or whatever isn’t locked behind an insane difficulty, I’m good. I miss the days where trying to beat the hardest difficulty rewarded you with a sense of accomplishment. You want to reward people in game for accomplishing the tough task of beating the game on a higher difficulty, add trophies/achievements that they can show off to their friends on Facebook or Twitter or what have you.
-||Some are bound to be locked behind the highest difficulty, you can’t have everything easily given||-
When it comes to costumes & weapons, the hell I can’t! I’ll learn how to hack shit first if I have to!
Parent? Me? Over my dead body. Just put different difficulty options.
Not all of us 90’s kids are parents, some of us have a brain and would rather not have kids.
So, more Kanto pandering while we get stupid easy mode? Hooray.
Yeah. I don’t want to see constant Kanto references unless I can visit Kanto in the post-game. There’s a reason why I’m playing a Gen 7 game rather than Fire Red. I’m done with Kanto. I’d rather see more Sinnoh stuff.
Here is a way to appeal to your long term/long time fans: QUIT REMOVING AWESOME FEATURES THAT PEOPLE LOVE FROM THE NEXT DAMN ITERATION!!! If you add the ability to let us have the first Pokemon in our party follow behind us or customization options for our avatar/trainer, I expect to get said feature in every single iteration after it!
I mean, why even bother innovating if you aren’t even going to make it a standard!? You’re just wasting your time & ours for a one time only thing!
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