I am playing Pokemon Violet at the moment and it is a total bore. I have played the game so many times and I just want to run around catch Pokemon and battle.
I do not need another tutorial about what a Pokemon center is. Or a tutorial to tell me that I need to use a Pokeball to catch a Pokemon.
Can we get a “I’ve played this game 100 times” mode where it just saves the tutorials and lets us play the game?
While I agree with you, I think Pokémon lost something along the way. It may be simply nostalgia messing with me, but there really isn’t that much sense of adventure anymore.
My first game was Pokémon Blue. In that game, you just walk out the door. No one is stopping you (except for Oak, and for a good reason). Once you try to set your foot outside of town, you get introduced to Oak and your rival, and you’re (after some fetch quest) told to just go and catch some Pokémon! The rest of the game, you sort of stumble upon things as you go!
I had a blast when I first encountered a gym without being introduced to what it was. The introduction to Team Rocket felt like a proper surprise, and so was stumbling upon a fork in the road or a cave. The HMs literally felt like keys to the world. My jaw dropped once I got Surf.
Maybe it’s nostalgia like I said. A tl;dr could simply be that avoiding handholding brings a sense of adventure, which brings immersion. Don’t explain what everything is before you have a chance to interact with the world. Let the player discover!
I agree with you 100%, I truly miss that sense of adventure and exploration gained from stumbling through a world and discovering things as they appear.
I’m definitely gonna sound like an old fart here, but it’s a symptom of the games and technology of today. The mindset TPC has when creating games is that they need to hold kids attention and that if they get stuck, they’ll just move on to some other game/video/whatever and drop Pokemon. Sadly I think they know their audience to an extent. I mean when I first played Blue it was literally the only game I had. When I got stuck in rock tunnel, all I could do was keep trying, and maybe get a peek at a strategy guide if i could get a parent to take me to a bookstore.
Now on switch they’re competing against a massive library of free games specifically tailed to get children addicted, and thousands of cheap options and single digit prices sales. It’s so easy for a kid to hit a wall and just drop it for the next shiny thing.
That said, if they want to keep their adult audience, they could really easily give an option to skip the tutorials, and maybe even an option for more complex dungeons (though that would require TPC to put in real effort, and we see how that’s gone so far). Sadly I don’t think we’ll see Pokemon return to that age of wold exploration, but hopefully the fan game community continues to thrive and pick up the slack in that area.
