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Wowie Zowie~

And beyond learning the basics of combat and how element, type of skills and damage vs hit works. Is it really a challenge for a child?

Even with Kanto dificulty curve with a rock gym first and the electricity gym next, the challenge is just grinding and keep fighting your way up. Unless the later Pokemon games got a serious AI upgrade or tracking your team to counter it's attacks, even a first timer will begin to stomp the game after the third gym.

Shinjidude said:

I guess the Patreon (and the Twitter account this is from) belongs to artist Merryweather, who seems to be a writer collaborating with (or commissioning?) other artists.

Merryweather is a writer, not an artist. Although I feel that tagging him for the comic he wrote is like tagging wilsonthegreen for kinkymation's Pokemusu series (pool #16659).

Edit:
Before this being brought up in the forum, either we start tagging the writers of a series/comic as an artist tag (like the aforementioned "wilsonthegreen". Hell, we should start tagging commissioners at this point), create a new tag for writers, or not tagging them at all.

blindVigil said:

The real problem with SV is that they didn't even bother to account for players not doing things in the "intended" order, despite the fact it's an open world game. On top of an untogglable EXP share further cutting any challenge that might exist. You're either fighting a trainer well above your level without warning, or you're fighting a trainer with lv10 pokemon because you're doing an "early game" area last without meaning to.

I dunno, I thought people all thought Team Star, Turo/Sada, and every single boss fights in Indigo Disk were appropriately challenging enough. Wolfey of all people, lost to champion level Nemona.

Even in this case with Iono, she did have a tera-elec Levitate mon as her ace, which is a decent enough challenge for an early game gym. Not notorious as Whitney's Miltank, but decent enough that you can't just spam starter STAB over and over and win.

Yes the trainer fights have been absolutely forgettable, but that's more of the issue that in previous games, trainers challenge you on sight and can be hard to avoid, therefore even with forgettable trainers, it's a challenge of endurance on how many of these mooks you can mow down before you'll feel desperate for a Pokemon Center.

But in SV all overworld trainers are now fully optional, healing items literally respawning, fly being accessible almost right away, and having Koraidon/Miraidon it's hard to ever feel that pressure ever again.

At least in turn they also do have those trainers with black speech bubbles who will always be a mini-boss level challenge in themselves, so I guess it also wouldn't be fair to say they're not trying to offset the difficulty some other way.

blindVigil said:

Everyone remembers being terrorized by Cynthia's competitive level Garchomp...

I do. I do remember suffering against Cynthia, and plotting strategies to beat her.
But that was THEN.
At Diamond & Pearl.
In 2008.
16 years ago.

blindVigil said:
The real problem with SV is that they didn't even bother to account for players not doing things in the "intended" order, despite the fact it's an open world game. On top of an untogglable EXP share further cutting any challenge that might exist. You're either fighting a trainer well above your level without warning, or you're fighting a trainer with lv10 pokemon because you're doing an "early game" area last without meaning to.

And this is the NOW.
The direction the franchise took, the path the company decided to thread.

Maybe my previous post was not well worded, I had my fun with the pokemon franchise along the decades.
But now it just don't appeal to me anymore, and I don't fault the company for it.
If they want the games to be friendlier and simplified, that's great.

I had great fun with SV, but didn't even finish the game before getting bored.

Himp said:

And beyond learning the basics of combat and how element, type of skills and damage vs hit works. Is it really a challenge for a child?

Finishing any Pokemon game without turbo buttons and reaching the end while also completing a Pokedex and building patience for the tediously slow battle system (even with fast messages) is challenging enough for any child without dying of boredom first.

No voice acting, no FMV, repeated animations, 60 USD game. It's the most lazy RPG develpment from a big company made. It could be a N64 cartridge and no one would notice the difference if it were not for the graphics. It happened with Animal Crossing.

It's a nice game (an overpriced one), but kind of hard to digest for kids these days.

rom_collector said:

Finishing any Pokemon game without turbo buttons and reaching the end while also completing a Pokedex and building patience for the tediously slow battle system (even with fast messages) is challenging enough for any child without dying of boredom first.
[...]
but kind of hard to digest for kids these days.

Yeah, things were quite different 25 years ago when we still had attention spans.

Shinjidude said:

I happened across the same logo (less prominent) at the end of post #6794913, but with different individuals involved. I guess the Patreon (and the Twitter account this is from) belongs to artist Merryweather, who seems to be a writer collaborating with (or commissioning?) other artists.

I don't think I'd even call it "a Patreon logo," since it's actually an organization (I dunno if it's legally a "company" or not), which I know of from being the foundation of the AstraLine VTuber group, including Merryweather's character as "Lucius Merryweather" even though we seem to tag it as Merry_(Merryweather).

My disappointment is immeasurable...