This is the problem with progressive franchises. At some point a cancerous growth will emerge along with the big fat shits developers like to take every now and then, which they will happily attempt to shove down our throats. The worse part is, Nintendo and Gamefreak are the kind who will eventually make us enjoy every last bit of it, regardless of how much we struggle at first.
Meet Gayry Motherhugging Oak. You hate him now. You will willingly go down on him in a month.
You seem to be missing a crucial point of Let's Go's setup: It's not any kind of 'replacement' for Red/Leaf's adventure in FireRed and LeafGreen, but a tale of its own with a new cast of main characters. Thought I'd clear that up for you.
That being said, I'm also critical of the game. However, I'm even more critical of thoughtless temper tantrums like these.
Котенок said:
This is the problem with progressive franchises. At some point a cancerous growth will emerge along with the big fat shits developers like to take every now and then, which they will happily attempt to shove down our throats. The worse part is, Nintendo and Gamefreak are the kind who will eventually make us enjoy every last bit of it, regardless of how much we struggle at first.
Meet Gayry Motherhugging Oak. You hate him now. You will willingly go down on him in a month.
As somebody who is openly critical of Gen 7 (though I will say it still has its good points), I can tell you I ultimately haven't enjoyed the Alola games themselves in the long run. I've enjoyed some things about them, but my faith in GF's junior dev team has been thoroughly decimated.
You almost had a comment featuring a good point. Shame that last jab had to undermine it.
Problem is, if the actual games coming out actually proved the fanbase wrong, and if these friendly rivals actually turn out to have some quirks, gimmicks, or character arcs which makes them more interesting than jerk rivals, I'm down for having them.
Problem is track record says they didn't. Barry was a first good nice go at a friendly rival because he is still competitive, he still genuinely wants to win against you, and Hugh and Gladion were good semi-jerk rivals since they at least have their own plot running alongside yours with actual twists(even if those twists are quite weak in the end) and a proper resolution.
Cheren, Bianca, Serena, the XY trio I can't even remember the names of, and Hau though? Your first impression is what their entire character is, and again, if not for Hugh and Gladion picking up the slacks, that would have been a 3 consecutive fails for GF.
Then there's also the issue about Gary/Blue being replaced. The problem here is less about the new character but more about the removal of a previous fan favorite. Sure, argue that the new game protagonist isn't Ash/Red so his rival shouldn't be Gary/Blue all you want, but when every other classic characters are returning, the plot is the same, and this entire game solely exists to pander to Genwunners, then the decision to include this particular character is just questionable.
Tl;dr. Why did they think this particular new character a better option than what already shown to work before?
You know, isn't it also kind of a problem of you guys not being 5 years old anymore? I mean, Gary is remembered as being some great rival more as a meme and sheer nostalgia than anything he actually did.
You've grown older. You've gained a much more discriminating taste. Being given the same mac 'n cheese you were served as a kid doesn't cut it for you anymore. That's normal. That said, it's not that mac 'n cheese got worse, you just learned to expect better.
Pokemon is still a kids' franchise, and they still give you "these guys are the bad guys because we said so" plots because they're worried kids won't be able to understand much more than that, and the adults who are still buying Pokemon are clearly not the sort to stop just because they've made every single rival nearly identical for what is it, 22 years now? (God, I feel old...)
Let me ask you back. Are Cheren, Bianca, Serena, or Hau remembered fondly by the children of this generation then? In 20 years will they be praising them as good characters then?
Call Gary Nostalgia bait as much as you want, the kids of these days aren't actually loving the modern rivals and looking forward to fighting them in their own games either.
In the past 20 years, since when has jerk rival became "un-kid friendly"? Wasn't the fact that they are nostalgia bait right now because they worked so well on us when we were kids? Was Silver not as well received in HGSS by the 8 years old of 2010 as much, if not even more than he was in GSC by the 8 years old of 2000?
The problem with people saying "you're all just old farts now so shut up about your nostalgia" is that you're just trying to discredit said old farts while not really validating why the modern thing isn't working against the supposed modern audience.
Besides, if they're not targeting nostalgia fag, why make it Kanto anyway?
The real reason why we 'love' Gary is not because he's an asshole rival, it's precisely because he's a goddamn snob beating him feels great, like knocking someone off the high horse to put him into the correct place-faceplanting on the ground.
The recent 'friendly' rival does not pose seriousness in the level of 'hurr durr we both get pokemon, guess I'll race you to the top!' shit like in the first two (R/B/G/Y and G/S) generations, they're more like 'hey we got pokemon, we're friends but wanna battle sometimes' kind of rival, which took out the satisfaction of beating them because you know they aren't really 'doing' the battle: it's just like a greeting.
Let me ask you back. Are Cheren, Bianca, Serena, or Hau remembered fondly by the children of this generation then? In 20 years will they be praising them as good characters then?
Call Gary Nostalgia bait as much as you want, the kids of these days aren't actually loving the modern rivals and looking forward to fighting them in their own games either.
Well, my nephew who plays sure seems to think so. For that matter, he's only old enough to have played since X and Y, which was his formative Pokemon experience. He hasn't played the original because... you know, it's kinda obsolete. (He actually looked in amazement at a Gameboy Color I had lying on a bookshelf...)
You just don't form those kinds of emotional bonds to games you never played, and they're never going to be as special to you when it's the fifth game you play instead of the first. When it's an objective downgrade to go back to the first game, you're only going to see it as an inferior game that had less mechanics and worse playbalance.
azurelorochi said:
In the past 20 years, since when has jerk rival became "un-kid friendly"? Wasn't the fact that they are nostalgia bait right now because they worked so well on us when we were kids? Was Silver not as well received in HGSS by the 8 years old of 2010 as much, if not even more than he was in GSC by the 8 years old of 2000?
They haven't, that's my point. They're just pulling minor twists on the same basic character to prevent them from being EXACT clones of one another, but it's the audience that's changing more than the characters.
Gary Oak didn't have depth any more than Hau does. He's just a jerk just because you need someone to be a rival, and it might as well be someone you can feel better beating. He only had like 12 lines in his game, for that matter, so you could honestly say that even just exposition dumping makes Hau a more nuanced character.
azurelorochi said:
The problem with people saying "you're all just old farts now so shut up about your nostalgia" is that you're just trying to discredit said old farts while not really validating why the modern thing isn't working against the supposed modern audience.
Besides, if they're not targeting nostalgia fag, why make it Kanto anyway?
Because it IS working with modern audiences. You're just not the real target audience.
It's like saying that Barney was a total failure just because you were too old for Barney when he came out, and all your other friends didn't like him either because they were too old for it, too. But, you know, Barney was a thing because it DID make money selling tapes to very little kids. Barney Hatred (note the section dedicated to Pokemon) is a trope for a reason (even if they renamed every trope that wasn't a Dr. Who reference...)
Besides that, I'm not saying "you're all just old farts now so shut up about your nostalgia", I'm saying that you'll never experience another first Pokemon game again, and it will always be a rehash, and you'll always be more and more critical of each one you play. The first one you played will always be the one that you look back upon with the least criticism. (I.E. Gen One Transformers is frankly painful to watch as anything other than snark bait, but I can go watch Prime and barely even wince at the "totally radical" dialogue.)
A LOT of people will talk about how Final Fantasy VII was the best Final Fantasy, but it'll always be 2 (IV) and 3 (VI) for me, and VII was just too emo... but I'll never be able to get someone who grew up after the SNES era to feel the same way I did when I first played a real story-driven RPG. Playing Final Fantasy for the first time absolutely blew my mind, and I still love the characters, even if they had maybe 6 lines of dialogue, because the archetypes enough were enough for me.
Firstly, I'm not defending the character of Gary/Blue. He's a shallow character, perhaps moreso than Hau, and any "depths" he has was entirely fandom-made, I'll give you that.
And yes, whatever Pokemon game you picked up first will most likely be one you remembered of very fondly. Kids these days will most always pick Hau over Gary, considering they don't even know or care who Gary is.
BUT no, being younger and dumber towards critiquing doesn't mean you unconditionally latch to your first experience. I've played Pokemon since gen 1 yet while indeed I never recognized any of its flaws when I was 5 years old, gen 2 and 3 are still so much better to me than gen 1 was, and yes even I have a hard time going back to play the non-remakes of gen 2 and 3 right now now that I'm old enough to see how massively poorly balanced those games are.
Gen 5, 6, 7 has a better plot than gen 1 and 2, that's also objective, so I will also give you the fact that characters as a whole may be better written. This may owe to the fact technology has advanced enough to show far more plot than just static pixel sprites.
But again, I will still say how GF handled rivals currently still is bad, regardless of how they compare to the previous rivals. The fact that they are basically replaceable clones of each other certainly doesn't help for their memorability.
Hau may be deeper than Gary, but it doesn't excuse that despite all things said and done, he's still a very shallow character that barely contributes anything to the plot. You could remove him from the game and the plot would've been the same.
That's why even after 7 years now, you still don't see kids growing up with Cheren and Bianca defending those characters. Despite the technological advancements that should allow them to show more, these rivals are giving us less things to remember them by. I'd call that the sign GF failed.
Compare that to Silver, Wally, Barry, or Hugh, where despite 2 of them being "friendly" rivals, actually directly contribute more to the story, or at least has their own character arc that show how they grow throughout their journey.
In Gen 7, we have Gladion for that, so that's why I said Hau is more forgivable, considering he has another character to cover his flaws up for him, but it still doesn't change the fact that as a standalone character, he's bad. So if this new game thinks it can get by with only a single "friendly rival" alone, I'd say that was a really terrible decision, for either older fans wanting to dive into nostalgia or for the newer ones going forward.
Btw. I still don't think this game is targeted for kids, considering again, it's Kanto and is connected to Pokemon Go, which was meant to bait people growing up during Pokemania to begin with.
I also don't believe it's supposed to tie in with the ending of Sun-Moon, because otherwise why would they not update the Kanto region to include Alolan Pokemons for the kids who want to pick this up after USUM?
