I have the same problem when I switch to Master Balls or whatever they are called. They all fly with a curve. Don’t know if that’s normal. It’s similar to that special shot you can do. Where you put your finger on the ball, draw circles till stars appear and then flick it. It’s impossible to hit for me.
My most comfortable way of playing the game is on the bus. I just ride the whole line back and forth. Eggs get hatched that way because the bus often times drives at walking speed. I’ve got loads of pokestops on the route that I can get and pokemon appear too. So it’s easy xp. Around 7000 per hour. So if I do that for an hour each day I’ll reach the level cap of 40 (2 mil xp) in around nine months. Yay?
But none of that matters anyway because the game has completely gone to shit since Saturday and I can’t play it. That’s when they rolled it out to a bunch of new countries and the DDOS attacks supposedly happened. Today I could play for around 10 minutes and it wasn’t for a lack of trying on my part. Really shitty service.
This is by far the most visible fad that has ever existed, aside from certain clothing or styling fads. In the hour I spend playing on the bus I see at least 8 people playing the game and that’s just what I can see from my seat.
Anyway, it’s a fad that I enjoy. I’ve played Wii Sports, Brain Age, Candy Crush, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawks and so on and I got enjoyment out of all these things. I even had Pogs at some point! Not everything has to have the lasting power of say Doom II, which I recently bought and played again. And some fads even lead to more lasting and substantial things, like Guitar Hero paved the way for Rocksmith and lead to me playing the guitar more. Tony Hawks made me pick up skateboarding. So who knows what this might lead to.
I had no idea about the circle motion thing, but I keep hearing that you can do curve balls intentionally so I guess that is how it’s done.
As for the random curve balls, it seems to happen for anything that is supposed to make it easier, like berries and advanced balls. I read somewhere that it is caused when the pokemon sort of glares angrily, so if you wait until their expression changes the curve balls wont happen.
Either that or it is some bullshit mechanic they put in there because this is a free to play mobile game and that’s just how they are these days
The circles motion thing is not a curve ball I think. It must have some other name. Because I get curve balls and the 10 xp that come with them all the time just from throwing normally. So there’s curve balls and then there are these spin throws, which I’m sure give more xp because they’re harder to land.
Has anybody figured out yet how the catching mechanic actually works? I mean what’s up with the shrinking green, yellow and so on circles? Supposedly you have a higher chance of capturing a pokemon if you let the circle shrink to its smallest and then land the ball in it. Or is that just for extra xp? Does it raise capture chance of I get the circle small but don’t land the ball in it? This game is so opaque. I’m sure it’s part of the design, so that people talk to each other about it. Still, a bit more explaining would have been nice.
Btw I never got into pokemon. I couldn’t stand more than 15 minutes of the Gameboy games. I tried them out again and, yup, still the same for me. Can’t understand people’s fascination with them.
There was a TV show that said that there was a video game that contains pets that love you.
Other than that, the concept of catching and raising and training and customizing creatures is really appealing. Plus, you can trade them with your friends.
Other than that
I mean, we can’t pretend that kids in general were really into outdated, somewhat underfeatured JRPG’s. The marketing blitzkrieg and winning concept were what really sold it.
I think most of the kids who were obsessed with pokemon back in the day due to the cartoon or other merchandise had no idea how to actually play the games.
My cousin had several of the games and just started them over from the beginning each time because he didn’t understand the concept of saving progress
Exactly. It must have been the pull of the TV show and other factors like that that made the games so popular because the games are so… Basic. Bare bones. The writing is absolutely atrocious. It’s written for very, very young kids at best, if I give it the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise I’d say it’s just crap and unimaginative. It’s also certainly hampered by the GB’s limitations. The battle system also seems like the most basic of basic.
Maybe all GB JRPGs were like that or maybe there were no JRPGs at all on the platform, so it stood out. I certainly never played one.
Yeah, the plots of GB JRPG’s were severely limited by the space on the cartridge, made even worse by the move from hiragana to romanji. Each hiragana sort of contains two romanji letters, so you can say about twice as much. This led to Final Fantasy Adventure’s plot literally being something like, “There was a castle. We were gladiators. They made us fight to the death.” Cool story bro. Can’t wait to see how it turns out.
All GB games were written in assembly code (only two levels above pure binary), partially due to space limitations, and so they used a lot of space saving tricks; and it was all pretty densely packed. A lot of the fun glitches in pokemon come from code doing double duty. I forget the full details, but the Missing No. trick is effected by some of the letters in your player name, because those letters are bumped into place and read by the game when it’s deciding the pokemon to call.
Anyway, I’m not sure if I feel that Pokemon’s battle system is more simplistic than its contemporaries. I mean, I have a whole thread based on treating the game’s current battle system as a competitive game rivaling Magic the Gathering (thus a lot more competitive than most JRPG systems). Kind of depends on what makes a JRPG system “complex.” There’s a lot of potential for strategy in Pokemon’s basic system, but the games are so easy and grinding is so fun that you’re never required to be creative in the single-player campaign. But–aha!–one of the major appeals of the game is battling with your friends. That’s where pokemon system shines. It’s unbalanced as hell (especially first gen), but it’s actually a really good example of something that’s simple at first glance but which become complex in a competitive context.
So, single-player, it’s just picking moves from a list, and it feels less tactical than having to manage an FF-esque magic system or whatever. But when you get competitive, you’re having to predict your opponent’s actions and you live and die by the Rock Paper Scissors aspect.
Final Fantasy Legends (which was helmed by Kawazu, the SaGa guy) had a complex (and kind of inscrutable) mutations system, based around mutant characters eating the meat of monsters you’ve killed. It also had magic, armor, items, etc. Iirc, mutant classes were kind of like pokemon with different attack types, while human characters were typical JRPG characters. Can’t remember how magic users worked–if it was only one race or what.
I think of FFL3 as the most complex JRPG on the original GB, because you traveled through time to the past, future, and present, each essentially a different world map. I don’t really remember the battle system, though. I think you could be humans or robots and robots were kind of like the mutants in the first game.
So, there wasn’t much in the outside-of-battle character customization that makes FF games so fun, but you did have the mix of characters that could use magic, items, or attacks. Not really sure if that’s more complex than a Pokemon that has four attack types, each of which could have different strategic advantages.
But–again–the game doesn’t really force you to think tactically or strategically. So the four move slots end up being, like, “This is my strongest move, but I can only use it 8 times, and this move misses a lot for some reason, and this one is a poison move, and this one heals me.” I’d argue that it has the potential to be more complex than a final fantasy, but it definitely was designed as a kiddie game, and the lack of balance in other areas points to the fact that Game Freak were not game design masters.
I think it was Chris Kohler who pointed out something that never occurred to me: the synergy between the Pokemon show and the games was absolutely brilliant.
The show basically served as a friendly instruction manual or soft guidebook for the games, teaching the young kid audience basic stuff about the world of Pokemon. I mean, its greatest strength was its emotional appeals (teaching you that Pokemon are pets that love you), which isn’t really much better than the toy commercials that were Heman and Transformers.
But other than that, it taught you that the basic thrust of the games is going from gym to gym, that you win badges, that you should want to “catch 'em all,” that Pokemon evolve, etc. Heck, I leared that the useless Magikarp became the awesome Gyarados from the show. So the show, itself, was kind of like extra sugary Nintendo Power.
Of course, the writers didn’t fully understand the product and took some liberties. I’m not sure how well they overall represented the type advantages, but apparently Pikachu used electric attacks against ground pokemon (who are immune) all the time.
Anyway, none of this helped your cousin learn how to save his game, but it did very subtly introduce a lot of kids into the world of pokemon. And if you were too young to read yet, it primed you to play the games in a year or two when you could.
I don’t think I ever really thought of the show like a manual for the game, but now that you explain it that way it makes total sense. In fact I definitely remember being bothered by how the show explained that pokemon need a lot of experience points to evolve, because I always imagined the stats from the game being abstract representation of growth rather than the actual trainers being able to say ‘wow my pidgey just leveled up’
So I guess my cousin probably knew everything about the world of the pokemon games before he ever touched one, besides all the actual game parts and the on screen text which he probably skipped.
Yeah, the joke goes that people saw the FF7 commercial, thought, “I need that.” Bought the game, fired it up, and then thought, “What the hell is this? Menus? Why can’t I just fight the guy with the sword?”
Actually, I guess I’m just cribbing another Chris Kohler anecdote from Retronauts–he said that someone returned FF7 because he didn’t know it would have reading.
But yeah: that felt representative to me. As a kid who liked to play JRPG’s pretty much every peer I ever had would react to JRPG’s by saying, “Why can’t you just fight the guy?”
Somehow, Pokemon got to slide past this criticism. I understand why (see above), but…I still find it surprising. Seriously: every kid I know was completely turned off the moment they even looked at a JRPG for my entire childhood. FF7 beat the trend with flashy graphics and cool images. Pokemon was just…kids really want to have special love connections with made-up animals.
I had a Mega Drive and a PC when I was little so I wasn’t even exposed to JRPGs until FFVII came out. Kind of sad because now I want to know what my reaction would have been. But I can say that even friends with an SNES didn’t play them. Maybe those games just weren’t big in Europe in general at the time? I certainly never saw marketing material for any JRPGs. Maybe that’s just my experience.
