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SwSh Game Freak "Lied"?

On the other hand, there's a difference between paying a fee every 3 years and doing it every year to maintain your collection, which can't all be transferred to SwSh. They're already promising fans that their favorites will be available... eventually and not all at once.
I agree which is why I would think most people would have enough sense not to even bother with Home until those other games come out. What’s the difference between sitting in a PC in Alola and sitting in Home in the meantime? To be fair, we have yet to find out.
 
The thing is that 355 Pokemon can be transferred, including 35 which aren't available in-game. If someone wants them now, are they supposed to wait for the next game to justify the fee, even though that game might not feature those Pokemon?
 
The thing is that 355 Pokemon can be transferred, including 35 which aren't available in-game. If someone wants them now, are they supposed to wait for the next game to justify the fee, even though that game might not feature those Pokemon?
I imagine that roughly the same amount or fewer people who used Bank would get Home for that reason and would only transfer the ones that could make it all the way through.
 
Okay, but how many of those players paid for Bank every year? I'd imagine that most of them only paid once for cross-generational transfers, whereas now they would be tempted to do it for every game.

And that's before accounting for the very real possibility that the GTS has been relegated to Home for an extra incentive to keep using the service.
 
Okay, but how many of those players paid for Bank every year? I'd imagine that most of them only paid once for cross-generational transfers, whereas now they would be tempted to do it for every game.

And that's before accounting for the very real possibility that the GTS has been relegated to Home for an extra incentive to keep using the service.
That depends entirely on how much time there is between games. Personally, I paid for Bank several times anyway because you couldn’t trade from Gen 6 to Gen 7 without it. Again, this wouldn’t change much.

We have no idea if the GTS will be relegated to Home. But who knows how they will incentivize it more than Bank? We’ll have to wait and see. From what we know right now, it doesn’t seem much more enticing.
 
That depends entirely on how much time there is between games. Personally, I paid for Bank several times anyway because you couldn’t trade from Gen 6 to Gen 7 without it. Again, this wouldn’t change much.

We have no idea if the GTS will be relegated to Home. But who knows how they will incentivize it more than Bank? We’ll have to wait and see. From what we know right now, it doesn’t seem much more enticing.
I believe Home is supposed to be like a nexus for trading battling and other features.
 
We don’t really know at this point. I am curious on your source for it containing battling and trading, though. Maybe there’s more info on it than I thought.

Per Serebii:
The utility also has the capability of allowing for trades with friends and others around the world directly through the Pokémon HOME app either locally or online.

I don't think anything on battles has been revealed.
 
I would be skeptical of it including battles, because it seems like it'd be totally unnecessary to have a dex cut at all in that case-they'd still make all the models, wouldn't they?
 
I would be skeptical of it including battles, because it seems like it'd be totally unnecessary to have a dex cut at all in that case-they'd still make all the models, wouldn't they?
We might have to settle for sprites in that case. I doubt Game Freak would bother to include models in Home when they couldn't be bothered to do so in SwSh.
 
There is weird thing about the models, some of them either have more or less polygons than their USUM versions. Not sure what that means
 
Y’all do realize that TPCi is a marketing and licensing company, right? They likely have little to no say in the developmental decisions of the game. That’s not their job. Their job is to market and sell what they’re given. In fact, they exist literally because of GameFreak’s product. If anyone is pressuring GF for SwSh’s development in any direction, it would likely be Nintendo. Otherwise, these are decisions made by GameFreak themselves.
I'm sorry, but I really cannot agree with this. Although TPCi is not responsible for game development and may not actually dictate Game Freak how to develop, the fact is that Game Freak is under serious crunch time precisely because TPCi is a marketing and licensing company. Sword/Shield really should have been delayed for better polish, but that would have also caused problems for the anime, TCG, manga, and everything else tied to the scheduling of these games. It'd be a financial blow to TPCi and they're not willing to do that. It's basically TPCi, and possibly even Nintendo as you said, calling the shots by keeping Game Freak to a tight schedule they can't opt out of.

Because how else do you keep a franchise fresh and current? By telling devs to make new games that will generate new content for the next anime and merchandise. Rinse and repeat.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Game Freak hasn't made poor decisions and they should be held accountable for them. But it's also important to realize that it is not just Game Freak to blame here. TPCi very much is, and may be even more at blame if they really are pressuring Game Freak to make these constant releases.

This is why multi-media isn't always good for a series. It made Pokemon popular, but now it's just gotten out of hand.

I imagine that roughly the same amount or fewer people who used Bank would get Home for that reason and would only transfer the ones that could make it all the way through.

And when the inevitable time comes when Bank's servers are shut down and there are still Pokemon who cannot be transferred to a game? (I may have misunderstood this though.)
 
I'm sorry, but I really cannot agree with this. Although TPCi is not responsible for game development and may not actually dictate Game Freak how to develop, the fact is that Game Freak is under serious crunch time precisely because TPCi is a marketing and licensing company. Sword/Shield really should have been delayed for better polish, but that would have also caused problems for the anime, TCG, manga, and everything else tied to the scheduling of these games. It'd be a financial blow to TPCi and they're not willing to do that. It's basically TPCi, and possibly even Nintendo as you said, calling the shots by keeping Game Freak to a tight schedule they can't opt out of.

Because how else do you keep a franchise fresh and current? By telling devs to make new games that will generate new content for the next anime and merchandise. Rinse and repeat.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Game Freak hasn't made poor decisions and they should be held accountable for them. But it's also important to realize that it is not just Game Freak to blame here. TPCi very much is, and may be even more at blame if they really are pressuring Game Freak to make these constant releases.

This is why multi-media isn't always good for a series. It made Pokemon popular, but now it's just gotten out of hand.



And when the inevitable time comes when Bank's servers are shut down and there are still Pokemon who cannot be transferred to a game? (I may have misunderstood this though.)
It’s not something to agree or disagree with lol. It’s a fact that they are a marketing company being blamed for all of SwSh’s development issues. Again: GF owns a third of TPCi. Creatures—the company who does all the Pokémon modeling—also owns a third of it. If the games had been delayed, TPCi would be in charge of continuing to market Alola and figuring out how to do so. I am not saying they’re blameless, but at the end of the day it isn’t their job to set up deadlines for games. It’s their job to keep things marketable and interesting based on what they’re given.

I’m not sure what point you’re making in regards to Bank. I believe you were indeed misinterpreting what I said.
 
Game Freak aren't our friends. Whether they're bad at phrasing or manipulative is ultimately not that important, unless you personally know them. Take whatever they say with a grain of salt, especially if there is reason to doubt it.

I wanted to make sure I addressed this comment specifically because I get what you're saying. They're not my friends, they're a corporation and we shouldn't confuse the two. For me it's a struggle with where my money is going and whether a company is ethical or not. I know nobody's perfect, but I was actually really struggling with this after learning about Nintendo and the issues people have with them using conflict minerals in their products. It took a lot of digging but I was able to find that they actually are concerned and doing something about it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...841654-d8e2-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html
CSR Report | Nintendo Co., Ltd.
https://www.nintendo.co.jp/csr/pdf/ModernSlaveryTransparencyStatement_en.pdf

As for #GameFreakLied, I checked specifically around what Masuda and co were saying at E3 when all this drama started:

vg247.com said:
“The biggest reason for it is just the sheer number of Pokemon. We already have well over 800 Pokemon species, and there’s going to be more added in these games,” Masuda explains. “And now that they’re on the Nintendo Switch, we’re creating it with much higher fidelity with higher quality animations. But even more than that, it’s coming down to the battle system. We’re making sure we can keep everything balanced and give all the Pokemon that appear in the games a chance to shine."

At the Nintendo Treehouse, Masuda's translator specifically talked about Pokemon being more "expressive" on the Switch. So what people read is that, "In order to animate every Pokemon better, we had to make the cuts", and because the models are "reused" it's considered a lie. I can see that side of it but I'm not 100% sold. Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part though?

If he had just said the first part about the "sheer number of Pokemon", the hole that's been dug wouldn't be nearly this deep (in my opinion).


EDIT: I need to give an update to tell y'all where I'm at with this. I just contacted Nintendo and got a refund for my purchase of Pokemon Shield on the eShop. I've deleted the preload off my system to make 100% sure things are on the up and up on my end.

I'm still not 100% sure what to think about all of this and whether Game Freak actually lied to us or not. But for financial and schooling reasons, I really don't have the time to try to figure it out right now. I'm not going to say I'm never picking up Sword or Shield but I need to take a step back for now.

The best case scenario would be for Game Freak to do what DeNa has done with Pokemon Masters recently; issue apologies and seek to make it right.


EDIT: Another update:
If Nintendo had given me my money back fully I would have probably just moved on and been done with it, but instead I got eShop credit. After doing a little more digging I went and repurchased the game, only this time I got Sword since at the time I was locked out of purchasing Shield. It was kind of a mess but what’s done is done.

I still maintain that Game Freak needs to issue some sort of apology the way DeNa did with Pokémon Masters. There’s a lot of goodwill lost right now and a spirit of humility would be much appreciated.
 
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@ItalianBaptist The "lie" mostly pertains to Ohnmori's statement in Famitsu. Someone at Reddit even paid for a professional translation to remove any doubt about what was said (I believe that Serebii also posted another translation to the same effect).

As for balance, I don't see how a fair few of the returning Pokemon will get a "chance to shine" (nor do I see how it's more notable than how VGC was restricted to the Unova/Kalos/Alola Pokedex in the beginning of each generation). Granted, even 400-ish is a very large roster and Pokemon aren't born equal, but Masuda's words about balance seem like a convenient exaggeration to me.
 
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As for #GameFreakLied, I checked specifically around what Masuda and co were saying at E3 when all this drama started:
You're focusing on the wrong time-frame. The smoking gun to which the hashtag refers is Omori's statements during the Famitsu interview a short time afterward. Since this got brought up again, yes, Omori spoke a falsehood in the Famitsu interview discussing the cut roster. This was not a mistranslation because several times over, professional translators and bilingual fans all corroborated that Omori said they were remaking Pokemon models from the beginning (the professional translators tended to use the English idiom "from scratch.
Either Omori premeditatively lied about remaking models, or he misspoke while meaning to say "textures" instead of "models" (which, while related, are not the same thing) and neither he - nor Masuda, making him complicit as well - corrected the error. At any point, Omori, Masuda, or Game Freak as a company could have and should have made an addendum but didn't. Either because they wanted the mistaken impression in the consumer minds or because they didn't have a good PR head urging them to correct themselves to the press.
It's still received as a lie though. There doesn't have to be malice aforethought for it to be a lie.
 
If the games had been delayed, TPCi would be in charge of continuing to market Alola and figuring out how to do so.
Again, that's not how that works. The scheduling of the anime and merchandise were all directly tied to coincide with the scheduled release of the games. You literally cannot tell the anime series "Sorry but Sword/Shield needed to be delayed, you cannot air the series at this time." Because that series is already scheduled to take up a time slot. And you can't just expect the animation studio to produce more episodes when the previous series was already written to end by this time. Whether you agree or not, delays are hugely expensive for a multi-media franchise. And in that way, it severely limits the games' and Game Freak's liberty.

And yes, Game Freak does own a third of TPCi. However that doesn't mean that TPCi still can't boss them around. They're the ones who manage the Pokemon franchise at large, not Game Freak.

I feel like this Twitter thread would explain it better.

 
Please note: The thread is from 4 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
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