Pokemon SM and LGPE Compare and Contrast

	Pokemon is fucking dying! And I don't think there's any saving it thanks to the sheer incompetence at Gamefreak! Ever since the introduction of XY, the series has just been in a sheer decline in quality for a multitude of reasons, be it the laziness of Pokemon design, the sterile world design, the Kanto circle-jerk, or the 4000lbs of forced, unskippable dialogue they shove down your throats. But with this I want to make comparisons to the 2 greatest offenders of the franchise in recent years; Pokemon Sun and Moon, and Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee. And honestly this went from "Man LGPE is the death of Pokemon" to "You know I'm starting to think this series has been shite for a while" and I want to go over the pros, cons, and negative implications the series can have just from examining these 2 games. But before that, I'm going to start off with a quick rundown of each game, and then slowly work on dissecting them as we move along. Hope you're ready for another 30k word essay on a children's game! :)))

	Pokemon Sun and Moon are the 7th gen installments to the mainline series, taking place in a tropical island setting similar to Hawaii in a subset of islands called Alola. The game forgoes gym leader fights in favor of unique events leading into a battle against either a totem (boss) Pokemon, or battling an island leader for your island mark or whatever so you can battle the island elite four. It attempts to derive from the basic formula, but still stays true to it for the most part. The main issues I want to tackle with SM are the lack of Pokemon variety and the obscene amount of handholding and text the game forces you to sit through. I'll be elaborating on these, along with other negatives, as we move on.

	Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee are """""core""""" installments to the franchise and serve as a gateway for Pokemon Go fans to give the games a try once more. The games are more or less a soft reboot of Pokemon Yellow, taking place in Kanto and more or less having everything you remember from Yellow, along with a few extra things, and while capturing Pokemon has been changed to resemble that of Pokemon Go, the core mechanics are more or less intact. The main issues I want to tackle with LGPE are removing features and content from the games, as well as the potential negative implications the game's mere existence has for the franchise moving forward.

	Now that you have a general idea of what these games are, I'm going to (try and) dissect them as I bring up their strengths and weaknesses in a compare and contrast sort of sense. And what I want to state first is the variety of Pokemon in each game, and while this was an issue mended in LGPE, it's an ongoing issue that exists in both SM and USUM. Like XY, SM borrows a lot of assets from the original Kanto games, from Alolan forms to just a very similar Pokemon pool, and that's in blame of the game only introducing a meager less than 100 new Pokemon. As such, you'll be seeing very basic Pokemon on your journey from start to finish, and having to go completely out of your way going for very low appearance rates just to get some variety on your team. This makes things such as repeat playthroughs and nuzlocke runs feel incredibly homogeneous, and plays as a major weakness to the game. Yeah there are new Pokemon, and yeah USUM KIND OF alleviates this complaint by increasing variety spread across the regions, but nonetheless it's just lacking in interesting monsters to place on your team. There's also balance issues I could further go into, such as there being WAY TOO MANY PHYSICAL ATTACKERS in comparison, leaving a clear weakness on most in-game teams that most people won't even notice until it's too late, and the new Pokemon in general just being very bland, boring and underwhelming.

	This sort of touches up on the competitive side of things, but outside of legendaries, and a very select couple other Pokemon, a lot, and I mean a LOT, of the Pokemon suck. Be it low attack stats, poor move pools, slow as a brick, and overall just being outclassed by the gen 1 options the game offers you, and you just have a lackluster roster for you to mess with while traversing through the game. And no I'm not complaining about some stupid competitive meta here, when your Pokemon feel underpowered, it's genuinely unfun to use them. In my original run I used Muk, Arcanine and Magnezone in my main party, and I still find that absurd. I want to use the time I have in the main game to mess around with Pokemon I would never think of using that many oldstays in a brand new experience of a Pokemon game. On top of that some of the evolve conditions being locked out until you reach the end of the game are ridiculous. You can get a Crabrawler on the first island but can't evolve it until you're right outside the E4. You also can't evolve your Charjabug, a Pokemon you can also obtain on the first island, until the very last island. How is that fun when, compared to say Diamond and Pearl, I could have a Garchomp as soon as I got access to Strength? The variety will always be one of SM's greatest weaknesses here.

	On that note, let's move onto the next subject; the narrative. Now LGPE, being a Yellow remake, is kind of safe from the exposition dumps that plague the 3DS games, emphasis on kind of. There's still far more dialogue than anything you'd see in Yellow, and the game still occasionally nudges you in the right direction with a forced cutscene. However, it isn't nearly as obtrusive as showcased originally. When I first saw demo's for the game, I groaned when I saw Professor Oak greeting you at Viridian Forest, talking to you for a good chunk of seconds and telling you to meet him at the end of it. I didn't know that was just a demo thing and immediately assumed it would be in the final product, and I'm glad I was wrong. LGPE respects you for playing at your own pace for the most part, and while it still has some really bullshit tedium handholding moments like every single gym having a conditional you have to meet before battling them, such as having the right Pokemon or being high enough leveled, it wasn't nearly as intrusive enough to take away from the overall experience. It's something they have definitely improved over compared to SM, but then again I assume that's because the story in Kanto with Team Rocket is extremely simplistic. Jesse, James and Meowth are really the only extra inclusions that end up spicing up dialogue, and they're far more like their anime counterpart compared to their unique NPC variants in Yellow, and that's fine.

	Sun and Moon on the other hand doesn't get off with the same headpat and cookie, and deserves every lashing for the forced story. It honestly baffled me when they made statements about wanting a new, less experienced crowd with LGPE when SM will grab your hand and make sure that you get from beginning to end. The amount of handholding in this game is obscene. You're stopped every half a route by an NPC who either heals your Pokemon, gives you healing items, just wants to talk, or all of the above so many times at some point or another you stop caring and just mash through text, and I don't think it was the developer's intention for the player to ignore text, because there's a disgusting amount of it. And while this isn't too egregious in your first playthrough, it really REALLY stands out on returns to the game. I'd argue that USUM is fucking unplayable if you already played SM prior, since it's the exact same story with maybe 3 or 4 new NPC's. Gamefreak needs to learn to cut down on the dialogue, or at least let the player skip it. There's just way too fucking much in SM, and I wouldn't mind the game, the characters, or the story nearly as much if Hau, Lillie, Kukui and whichever captain of the island I'm presently on would just shut the fuck up for more than 10 minutes at a time. And yes while the story is nice and the writing is indeed a step up from XY, it makes the game completely unplayable past its initial playthrough, and when you have a game where both replaying it sucks, and end game content sucks, the entire package just ends up souring after you beat the E4 for the first time.

	But enough shitting on Sun and Moon, let's bring the spotlight back on LGPE for probably one of larger offenses here, and that's the removal of game mechanics. Let me start by saying that natures suck ass and are as toxic to IVs and EVs. A good game doesn't need those things to entice a player in developing his party, and those only exist as extra grinding steps the player can partake in if he so well chooses, so I'm not going to touch up on that too much just yet. But removing held items and abilities completely waters down the entire experience. If you've never played a Pokemon game since RBY or GSC, you most likely won't be too bothered by this. But as someone who has been around for 2 decades, you can't just cuck your core fanbase out of these mechanics, and moreso when you leave in newer shit like busted moves and mega evolutions. You either make a full commitment to catering to the nostalgia crowd, or you release the full package and bank on newer folk picking up on the mechanics, which honestly it isn't that hard at all to do in the first place.

	One of Golem's strengths was being able to at least take 1 hit with Sturdy, and that's gone. Dugtrio's ability to trap a Pokemon in against him and abuse his speed to revenge kill is gone. The game wanting to stay true to its roots along with the removal of held items such as Eviolite means Onix is always going to be a complete fucking joke in this game. Marowak will always be extremely inferior to Rhydon because of his garbage attack stat and inability to boost it with Thick Club.  I could honestly name dozens upon dozens of examples here stating why this was a shit design choice and how many Pokemon it actually neuters.. Once again, I want to stress I'm not complaining about things at a competitive level, but when you remove unique aspects of a Pokemon with these abilities and items, not only are you gutting a layer of strategy that could be utilized to help a player against a challenge, but you're also homogenizing the monsters in general.

	Now the game is filled with these weirdly shaped balls of stats that sometimes have powerful moves, and you're playing exclusively to type advantage, and nothing more. That's really boring. A new entry will never have the experience of playing around abilities like Poison Point and Static, or planning ahead with damage mitigation and then abusing low HP abilities like Blaze or Torrent. Instead they'll clap at stuff they remember 20 years ago while abusing whatever 90BP move you get in Cerulean City. And while yes this does normalize things for new players, how does it help them moving forward. All you're doing with the next Pokemon game is confusing them further. You thought having to learn new Pokemon would be overwhelming? How about when they're also forced to learn about all these different abilities and held items on top of it? It is a garbage design choice that only caters exclusively to the short term player.

	I also want to make a quick break in here and go over the capturing system, and how horrifically flawed it is. It's your main source of experience, and you'll be capturing more Pokemon than you will be battling trainers. Now early on, similar to the safari zone, you're given items that improve capture rate, and it works in the early game. It doesn't work in the late game however. Using a razz berry on a Pikachu in Viridian Forest guarantees the capture, but using a golden razz berry on a Machoke in Victory Road still doesn't guarantee the capture, and that kind of shit is absurd. At least with wild battles, I can control and dictate a lot in the fight prior for going for the capture, from status effects to abusing False Swipe to make sure they're at 1HP. I can't do that in LGPE, and it makes chaining Pokemon one of the bigger draws in end game phase, a fucking nightmare. Try to chain a Chansey and honestly tell me how many times you got aggravated over it before chaining it enough times where it turned into (almost) a guaranteed capture.

	I also stated that competitive stats like natures and EV's were gone earlier, but IV's aren't. Weird they remove the fun stuff with abilities and items, as well as removing breeding, which is something Masuda "mocked" players for constantly doing at the end of the game (despite having to because getting 6 IVs on anything is a fucking monotonous nightmare) yet included these garbage IV stats into the game. I don't like IV's, and I never liked IV's. If I capture a Pokemon, it should be ready to go outside of moves and potentially its ability. I don't want to have to spend hours grinding one out just so my party can be as efficient as possible. And yes while this is actually a competitive complaint, it still baffles me that they would include it in the first place. This game isn't supposed to be competitive, yet they include the most competitive-forced offender into the game. Makes no fucking sense.

	Now earlier I stated negative implications that would come with LGPE, and thanks to the game selling very well, along with the director of the game openly stating that "it is not a spin-off game" these fears might come into fruition. Sun and Moon has an obscene amount of problems for a Pokemon game, but it's still designed to be a Pokemon game. There are several areas in Let's Go where it isn't designed to be a traditional Pokemon game, such as forced motion controls, capturing playing out like a safari zone expedition, and mobile connectivity, and while that's all fine if the product is self-contained, it's clear as day to anyone with half a brain that this isn't going to be self-contained, and we may see these casualizations of an already casualized game take roots in future titles. Like you need a phone just to both obtain and evolve a Pokemon in the game. That's ridiculous, and if these games become connected to the core series in the future, I honestly want off this ride.

	I want to first list off what I would like to see changed in the next title, implementing changes and positives from both SM and LGPE to create the ideal product that everyone can be satisfied with;

	-Less dialogue/optional dialogue
This one should be a given at this point. Any player of any age doesn't like control of a game being taken away from them, and if they really need to push an in-game narrative to sell characters and unique Pokemon to the crowd, at least make it optional. The first time it's fine, the 5th time it's literally unplayable.
	-More unique/powerful Pokemon
I want to have fun leveling up a new Pokemon for the first time. I love obtaining something I've never seen in another game, and spending the duration of the main game seeing how it functions from start to end, and when you either have all these new critters hidden away in corners of the game, or restrict their power in such a way it makes fucking Magneton and Muk look like fresh as day alternatives, you did something wrong. That's a change I hope for in future titles.
	-More options
Let kids throw their fictional Pokeballs at the screen, and let millennials connect their iphones to their switches, but make that shit optional. Not all of us like that sort of stuff.
	-More freedom
I think one of the biggest reasons RBY and GSC are so popular are due to the freedom they allow the player to have. You can argue they're still linear JRPG's and that's fine, but when you put them next to SM or XY where 1 set of games will openly let you diverge and even skip gyms or do shit completely out of order, while the other set of games will force you onto a path with waypoint markers all while you have people with Pokemon blocking every single other optional path available, it's clear to see that sort of linearity can be self-destructive and a turn off for a lot of people.

	Now that's what I HOPE for, but I fear we'll never get a Pokemon game following these simple guidelines either, and that's due to laziness, which I can't really fault Gamefreak for, as they can just slap Pokemon on any half-assed pile of trash and sell millions off of name alone. Which is why I fear for the future, and why I spent over an hour typing all this up in the first place. I'm worried that players will be forced to have a phone just to complete the Pokedex. I'm worried that I'll have another game where, the entire time, I'm thinking "man I'd much rather just play Platinum or Crystal." I'm worried that, sooner or later, we'll get something that clearly isn't Pokemon, yet is being sold as Pokemon. I'm worried about the direction this franchise has been going for the past 4 years, and it truly feels disgusting when all I can hope for is something better to replace the series with in the future.

	Those are my thoughts and ramblings on all this though. Originally I wanted to complain about LGPE, but after playing a bit of Ultra Sun, it made me realize there are just way too many issues ingrained into the franchise as a whole, and despite being a very huge fanboy for the series, as I did grow up with it, I'm seeing all these issues pop up and, with each passing year, the franchise is drifting further and further away from what it used to be, and this isn't a "I'm getting old" issue since I still did somewhat enjoy LGPE, and I can still enjoy replaying most of the older games. It feels bad, man.