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Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

@Misfit Angel Those look fantastic! I'm getting a military honor's vibe from them; perhaps relationships to past (possibly long-forgotten) conflicts?

Oh, and did anyone catch today's direct?
 
A couple years ago, I toyed around with making flags for every country and region that was ever mentioned in Land of the Roses. Interesting, Lanark (where the story is set) was the only one that didn't get a flag design for some reason.

OzwTTPi.png

They're not strictly flags by size and shape; I was making these graphics for an ill-fated atlas that sought to put some details behind all of those throwaway country names. It was pretty fun coming up with these designs though, I should probably do something with them. Especially that blue one, which was meant to be Unova and feature an attempt at recreating New York's state flag.
yo, these look sick!!

Regarding those specific ones above... I'm trying to figure out any of the symbolism on any of them and I'm not coming up with much. The best I can think of with the colored stars on Kanto's flag is the legendary birds. Same with the feathers on Johto, I guess, but the rest? Doesn't look like anything with any particular meaning.
my best guesses --

Kanto -- three stars for the birds; it's indigo colored for the league? The red/yellow/blue are probably for the birds specifically, although it should be noted that most of the cities are also named after those colors. Dunno why it's a moon.
Johto -- skies and sea; just like in Johto, the non-birb legendaries get no love here.
Hoenn -- it's a big ole' splotch of red and a big ole' splotch of blue cut in half by a big green line. Smells like Rayquaza stopping Kyogre and Groudon from eating each other
Sinnoh -- at first I thought it was 12 ticks for a clock/time/dialga, but it looks more like 16 plates for Arceus? I also didn't play Sinnoh so I'm not sure.
Unova -- three musketeers? I think? Red and blue swooshes could be zekrom/reshiram, but kyurem isn't green, soooooo three musketeers. or the three genies
Kalos -- lmao this looks like the window in the back of the stage on smash brothers that's set on Kalos, so I'm guessing this is the window in the Kalos E4
Alola -- four stars for the four Tapus (or islands; idk), and then four more Z-Crystals because lol gimmicks[/quote][/QUOTE]
 
Now that I'm actually not on auto pilot and double asleep, let's look at this flags again.

Dunno why it's a moon.
Mount Moon? ¯\(ツ)

skies and sea; just like in Johto, the non-birb legendaries get no love here.
Makes sense. I keep forgetting that Lugia is tied to the sea considering its psychic/flying abilities are what it's really known for.

it's a big ole' splotch of red and a big ole' splotch of blue cut in half by a big green line. Smells like Rayquaza stopping Kyogre and Groudon from eating each other
I plead your excuse for Sinnoh: I didn't play through Hoenn, so that's why I don't know :V

I also didn't play Sinnoh so I'm not sure.
Gotta fix that ;)

Unova -- three musketeers? I think?
Perhaps the three waiters with different colored hair in that one restaurant are such a national icon they changed the flag just for them.

Kalos -- lmao this looks like the window in the back of the stage on smash brothers that's set on Kalos, so I'm guessing this is the window in the Kalos E4
The window idea also makes sense... Since Kalos is meant to represent France, perhaps it's something you'd see in the religious buildings, like the stained glass stuff in cathedrals.

Alola -- four stars for the four Tapus (or islands; idk)
This plus Pavell's comment about Polynesian flags makes the most sense to me.
 
the reddit thread mentions that they're based on the flags of the corresponding real life locations so take that into consideration
 
Unpopular opinion here, but I don't feel like those flags suit the Pokemon regions very much.
Then again, many real life flags appear bland to me.

@Misfit Angel
Nice flags, I can really see the Britishness coming through, haha.
 
Oh, flags! Wonderful! Not a huge vexillology nerd myself, but I can appreciate a good flag. Those ones Kintsugi linked seem a touch arbitrary at first glance but I do like the designs quite a bit!

I'm doing alright. Still no jobseeking success, but I've been cooking a lot and I've got a driving test tomorrow. Wish me luck!
 
Hiya! Haven't been in this thread for a while, so I guess I'll jumpstart it with a bit of commentary on (somewhat) recent Pokémon news.

So... #BringBackNationalDex. Initially I thought that it was just some fandom overreaction, but after reading about everything, I can see why people are upset about this. At the very least, it doesn't look good: less features for more money, when high-resolution models have been available since the 3DS era... what!? That said, there's another side of me that thinks that even with all of the arguments that people have thrown out, it can't be that easy to just throw models into a game and call it a day, right? There could be complications during development, they could be running on a new or updated engine that doesn't like said models, or any number of issues (although one wonders why they wouldn't mention any of those possibilities). Plus, although I'm sure we'd like to think that we'll be able to transfer all of our Pokémon to every game forever, the reality is that there was never really any guarantee of that; it's all on Game Freak to allow that, and they can stop doing so entirely at their own discretion, for better or worse. If anything else, this should be a reminder of how transient data — that is, your Pokémon — can be in an increasingly digitally driven world controlled by publishers, not players.

Meanwhile, what's kind of funny is that although this doesn't really affect me as a Pokémon player at all (I never transfer my teams over), all of this negativity is actually starting to sour me on Sword & Shield somewhat. Although perhaps that's because I haven't been too hot on it in the first place, just mildly interested. The whole Dynamaxing thing certainly caught my attention, but not quite as much as Mega Evolution and Z-Moves did, neither of which I was a major fan of in the first place. And... I don't know, maybe it just feels like the same old, same old right now (except, again, with less features for more money).

Right now, of all things, I'm actually most interested in the story (which I probably would've never said about a Pokémon game three years ago, haha). If that doesn't ultimately catch my interest, then I'm probably not going to go for a day-one purchase this time, or even a few-months-later one; I'll might choose to catch up on some of the older Pokémon games instead.
 
I usually play new regions with a regional team, so this wouldn't be an issue in itself ... but in the long-term I like to collect pokémon. Realistically I was always likely to pass on this game anyway. The story, such as it was, of either XY or SM didn't enthuse me, and the increasingly melodramatic themes in the games don't appeal any more. They're not meant to, in fairness.

So although I may well keep an eye out for the new species (And periodically make snide statements about how British Galar isn't), like as not I'll be ignoring these games
 
I have a number of opinions on the whole controversy, and it really boils down to "why is the team working on the most valuable franchise in gaming only like 150 people?" tbh. What's frustrating is not that you can't transfer all your mon, but that any mon sent to Home are stuck there, and that the reasons for this don't add up. They already have high quality 3D models for every mon with both walking and running animations. And the animation quality of SwSh doesn't look impressive compared to Battle Revolution. Eh, I'm just gonna wait it out until after release and see what the damage really is.

But hey, corviknight good. Wooloo good.
 
I'm in favour of #BringBackNationalDex overall, I would say, though I can somewhat see GameFreak's side to things as well. Usually I prefer to play through the game with a team from that region and then transfer all my old favourites up. That being said, I'm increasingly wondering if there's much purpose to doing so, if there's no Mega Evolution and no guarantee of substantially more postgame, so I might either keep Alpha Sapphire as their permanent home or transfer them to Sun once I finish that game. Difficult to say, there are a few Megas I like a lot, most of them I'm indifferent to. I've not once used a Z-move and probably never will, and I really don't care for Dynamax at all, so maybe on reflection it is time for me to stop transferring after all. I still think it's important for the option to remain open for the thousands of players that would want to, though.

It's difficult to say whether the amount of work is something they could do, and are choosing not to invest into, or if it would be too much for the game's planned launch. I had the chance a few months ago to play about with some Gen 6 models and rigs. I'm not an expert in that side of things, but I suspect the models would be a bit too basic if they were transferred directly across to the Switch, so if I'm right about that they'd all need some attention to keep them looking smooth. That would also mean a lot of the rigging work would need doing again because you need to 'skin' the newly-refined model and its new and different polygon structure, that is, you have to tell the skeleton how each joint should affect the model. The textures also would need redoing to some extent, because the 3DS ones look a little blurry around the edges (technical term) on a higher resolution screen. And the Dynamax forms of everything would need all of the above doing as well, because if they just upscaled a model by that much it would end up looking blocky, and not very good (though if you ask me, that's more just another reason why Dynamax was a silly idea than a reason to scrap a load of Pokemon). Again, I'm not an expert in this area, so maybe there are easier ways they could do this that I'm not aware of, but I definitely think the potential workload is being underestimated to some extent.

That being said, this is still Pokemon we're talking about. I find it hard to believe the most valuable IP in the world couldn't find the resources to achieve all that if they really wanted to. I don't know, I get the idea they want the game to be out fast, after a lot of people were unsatisfied with Let's Go. I kind of feel now they've promised a rough release date they don't want to go back on that like many other Nintendo games have done recently. Hmm. Perhaps the best to hope for is they'll add compatibility for more Pokemon in patches after the game's released. Or maybe releasing a third version/updated versions with a National dex. Who can say, I could continue rambling on, but in the end I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
 
And the animation quality of SwSh doesn't look impressive compared to Battle Revolution.
The other day, a gif of Honchkrow's fainting animation in Battle Revolution got onto Reddit's popular page, and one of the comments basically said that Game Freak were really phoning in their animations compared to Genius Sonority. In fact, a lot of Pokémon stuff feels phoned in nowadays. I don't like Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon, but now I'm grateful that it was one of the last spinoffs to have an in-depth story, something I took for granted for most of my life, with Detective Pikachu being the last remnant of the DS age of spinoffs.
 
I think Nitro Indigo's signature (well, it's also uA's quote) is particularly relevant to the #BringBackNationalDex. Not because of Kanto-pandering, but because Game Freak can't expect to keep on giving us the same old thing over and over again except with less features each time. Sure, they've moved to 3D - which is great! - and started putting effort into the story, as seen with Gen V and now SM, but they're ignoring almost everything else people loved about the older Pokemon games: the ability to really explore routes and areas (actually getting lost in caves!), getting a challenge from post-game facilities such as the Battle Frontier, and of course, making sure that people who create living dexes can actually do that by providing ways for most Pokemon to be obtained (be it through transfers, swarms, or something else).

I first became irritated with this after ORAS - when HGSS included tons of Crystal content, you're telling me that ORAS couldn't even include the Battle Frontier? Really? And you know what the straw that broke the camel's back was? Skitty. Freaking Skitty. That pathetic, flimsy scrap of a kitten had a miniscule encounter rate and I had to spend hours searching for it when I was playing Emerald. But, I guess we need to make sure that all the popular, cute 'mons are easy to get because no one has time for that these days, so let's make them one of the most common Pokemon you can find near Rustboro! The increase of Skitty's encounter rate made me realise that Game Freak has forgotten that a good challenge is what makes these games fun in the first place. Sounds dumb, and it may not be why Skitty's encounter rate was increased in the first place, but there you go.

Also, here's why things like SM's battle tree don't compare with the Frontier - Frontier introduced new battle formats, while SM's Tree is just a few extra but generally average Elite Four/Champion battles. Game Freak needs to realise that what Pokemon really needs is a new perspective on things to keep it feeling fresh, which is what made stuff like Battle Frontier and Gen 5 good (in my opinion).

TL;DR Game Freak needs to include more creative challenges into their games.

My actual opinions on this have slowly soured, and I flip-flop between trying to stay positive and telling myself "what good is a Pokemon game that doesn't have half the Pokemon in? Why didn't Game Freak just expand their team?!"
 
That's an interesting point. It certainly seems that since BW, the world of each region has been getting smaller. It started with Unova being a circuit. Kalos wasn't really small, but there was a lot of open space and big models just in the way. You couldn't see much of the region at any one time. Then along comes Alola where the entire game world occupies all the map, so there's no sense that behind the treeline there's some more of the region just not in the game world.

I tend to flip-flop over whether I was ambivalent about Kalos and annoyed by Alola because the games aren't aimed at me, or because there's something significantly different about them. I think it's fair to say that for all their pretensions of being darker, they're aimed squarely at young players, with the appeal of the competitive metagame existing mostly as an afterthought. I'm beginning to think that Game Freak believe repetitive Kanto-pandering will do the job of keeping the older players about. Aside from the fairly obvious problem that there's a swelling number of players for whom Hoenn or Sinnoh are nostalgic history, it misses the point that people enjoyed Kanto games for more than just Charizard
 
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