Your controversial opinions

[There Is No Arceus]

Whole-party Exp Share streamlines the playthrough itself by making me not have to grind nearly as much for the most part.

Whole-party EXP share streamlines the playthrough by making my whole team 10 levels higher than Candice's pokemon despite me not having grinded since Eterna. Seriously, let me turn that thing off.

 

[FlitPix]

Whole-party EXP share streamlines the playthrough by making my whole team 10 levels higher than Candice's pokemon despite me not having grinded since Eterna. Seriously, let me turn that thing off.

Whole-party EXP share doesn't change how much experience you gain, it makes it to where you don't have to sit in a route for ten hours grinding the rest of your team to a competent level before the Elite Four. It doesn't increase your overall EXP gain. Friendship did.

Regardless, this is less of a problem with the mechanics themselves and more of a problem with the game needing to be playtested and balanced around the mechanics.

...But also yes, adding back the toggle would be nice. Never understood why they removed it.

 

[Daren]

Whole-party EXP share doesn't change how much experience you gain,

It increases the amount of Exp gained significantly; it doesn't split earned experience, it gives everyone who didn't battle 50% of the full value.

 

[FlitPix]

It increases the amount of Exp gained significantly; it doesn't split earned experience, it gives everyone who didn't battle 50% of the full value.

...Which makes up for the grinding you would do later. I vastly prefer this over training Pokemon right before the Elite Four that I rarely used in my party.

It takes that time you would devote to mindless, not fun grinding at the end of the game, and spreads it throughout the entire playthrough.

 

[Rachael]

Here's an opinion that may not be unpopular, but is certainly controversial:

I want Pokemon to become a single-game series. I don't want dual versions, I don't want third versions, I don't want dual sequels (regular sequels are fine), and I don't want DLC. Now it seems there will be two DLCs, each one you have to pay for, and with two games, that's even more money...This is getting ridiculous. (At least, that's how I understand it.) And yes, I think Pokemon games should be cheaper, so sue me. (This isn't directed at you guys, but at Game Freak/Nintendo/The Pokemon Company/whoever's behind this.)

And I'm also mad at my OCD for making me buy everything. To be fair to Game Freak/Nintendo/The Pokemon Company/whoever's behind this, it's not their fault I have OCD and a compulsive need to have "complete" collection. I'm glad I'm only into a couple of series.

 

[Kanjouhi]

...Which makes up for the grinding you would do later. I vastly prefer this over training Pokemon right before the Elite Four that I rarely used in my party.

It takes that time you would devote to mindless, not fun grinding at the end of the game, and spreads it throughout the entire playthrough.

Yeah, before the full-party share your choices were basically "grind with your starter to the point where you can solo with it", "catch new mons for basically every major battle because you somehow still have level 18 mons in your party in Victory Road" or "spend HOURS grinding just to get the rest of your team up to around the same level as your starter". Whenever I play Platinum or White 2 I always end up only having two or three mons that I ever brought out into fights, just because I didn't care enough to grind my whole party when I can just grind the ones I like and catch new ones when I have a hole in my team for whatever the nyext gym is.
(Though, I do get why some people would wanna have a toggle.)

 

[FlitPix]

Now it seems there will be two DLCs, each one you have to pay for,

You pay once and get both. Otherwise I definitely see where you're coming from.

 

[FelipePR]

Whole-party Exp Share streamlines the playthrough itself by making me not have to grind nearly as much for the most part. The Poké Radar is improved over even XY's interpretation of it.

Whole-party EXP share streamlines the playthrough by making my whole team 10 levels higher than Candice's pokemon despite me not having grinded since Eterna. Seriously, let me turn that thing off.

Firstly, I like all exp-share and how, theoretically, it helps us when we have or want to train, or to avoid spending too much time training. However, there are games that were not made or adequately prepared for this mechanic.

This is the case of BDSP, in which your Pokémon are quickly overleveled since the game, gameplaywise, differed very little from the original games, which did not use the current experience sharing system.

So, to have a good experience, what did I do? I started to completely rotate my Pokémon. At each Gym I completely changed my team and often swapped some Pokémon along the way.

As a result, I arrived at the Pokémon League with an underleveled team and was completely stomped by the most ruthless and competitive Elite Four in the franchise.

And, as I don't use medicine in battles and use Set battle style, I ended up having to grind to be able to win the League. In other words, in my case, the BDSP Exp Share System ended up causing the opposite result to what was expected.

Unfortunately, what I experienced, while playing BDSP, was an incredibly unbalanced game, where everything was a breeze until reaching the Pokémon league, and then, suddenly, things weren't so easy anymore.

 

[Poke Dragon]

Here's an opinion that may not be popular, but is certainly controversial:

I want Pokemon to become a single-game series. I don't want dual versions, I don't want third versions, I don't want dual sequels (regular sequels are fine), and I don't want DLC. Now it seems there will be two DLCs, each one you have to pay for, and with two games, that's even more money...This is getting ridiculous. (At least, that's how I understand it.) And yes, I think Pokemon games should be cheaper, so sue me. (This isn't directed at you guys, but at Game Freak/Nintendo/The Pokemon Company/whoever's behind this.)

And I'm also mad at my OCD for making me buy everything. To be fair to Game Freak/Nintendo/The Pokemon Company/whoever's behind this, it's not their fault I have OCD and a compulsive need to have "complete" collection. I'm glad I'm only into a couple of series.

I completely agree.

I'll even go further and say that the only sequel that Unova needs is a one-version sequel, where the region itself is paradoxical in nature.

 

[Zexy]

Yeah, I'd argue that BW/B2W2 still feel modern/recent enough that it'd be wiser to just call Switch versions enhanced ports instead of remakes and add a few things from more recent entries (such as Fairy type, newer moves/abilities/items, B2W2 forms in the original, make it possible to catch more of the 649 dex without using Home, maybe even add the cross-gen evos from after Gen 5???, etc) and maybe some original stuff like new postgame content while they're at it.

All it would take is a bit of an expanded Nature Preserve, maybe accessible immediately after the League, to give room for the extra species.

i'm of the opinion that instead of the usual paired versions, they should release remakes of BW and BW2 at the same time, with version exclusives in each. Add the new areas from BW2 to BW as postgame content; maybe hide one of the sages there.

It would be cute to visit Aspertia back when Hugh, his sister and Nate/Rosa were still there and younger, when the Trainer School was not yet a gym and Roxie was just a new star musician...

 

[Norzan]

One of the major problems with the current Exp. Share is how completed detached you will feel from most of the party. Before you had to send out a pokemon to at the very least get experience and thus actually participate in a way. The only exception would be when you were using the old Exp. Share but that only applied to one pokemon. Wide party exp means more often than not a pokemon will never actually participate in a battle, not even show up once, but will be in the background doing nothing while leveling up and evolving if it can. You see it evolve and you most likely feel nothing because it hasn't even come out of the pokeball once to do battle and basically contributed nothing.

People are also incredibly overdramatic when it comes to old pokemon games when they claim you had to grind when in reality you didn't. If you fought most trainers, you would be at worst like three to five levels below whatever you had to fight and that was more enough because all you had to do was actually interact with the game's mechanics to get an advantage in battle and not just brute force by overleveling. The type chart, the setup moves, status moves and so on aren't there for window dressing, the devs wanted you to use them to come up with strategies. The old pokemon games had actual level curves, ones better than others, unlike the recent games where you can't tell what the level curve is meant to be given the sheer amount of exp you gain.

In my opinion party wide exp only works in RPGs where you use the whole party at once in battle like in Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. Because while everyone gets exp, everyone is contributing to the battle one way or the other.

 

[There Is No Arceus]

...Which makes up for the grinding you would do later. I vastly prefer this over training Pokemon right before the Elite Four that I rarely used in my party.

It takes that time you would devote to mindless, not fun grinding at the end of the game, and spreads it throughout the entire playthrough.

i don't really get the aversion to grinding. i just go watch an episode of something while devoting 3% of my attention to the game. A bit of grinding at the end is vastly preferable to the entire game being a giant snoozefest until the E4. Of course, this wouldn't be an issue at all if GF just gave us the ability to toggle the EXP Share. But GF doesn't seem to like options.

 

[Zexy]

Very unpopular opinion I guess, but I do not mind new Exp Share at all. If you want challenge, you could use some house rules or just rotate more Pokemon...

 

[There Is No Arceus]

Very unpopular opinion I guess, but I do not mind new Exp Share at all. If you want challenge, you could use some house rules or just rotate more Pokemon...

the problem is that the new exp share is forced on us. I don't mind it existing, so long as i can turn it off.

 

[Norzan]

If you want challenge, you could use some house rules or just rotate more Pokemon...

If i have to gimp myself through self-made rules to have even a modicum of challenge, maybe that's a problem with the game and not the player. Now if the games actual had difficulty options, and maybe even better a built-in nuzlocke challenge.

 

[Bolt Strike]

It was said recently here that BDSP were the worst remakes to have come out, but I'm going to go ahead and say that they are nearly on par with FRLG to me, and are underrated and still worth playing now.

I don't usually replay Pokémon games like others seem to enjoy doing. I generally play through them once, then focus almost entirely on post-game content. I also don't play Pokémon primarily for the story (so, in my mind, SV are not amazing, but that's another topic).

In my mind, FRLG and BDSP are designed very similarly. Both are very close to their source material with inherent improvements brought about by both the new hardware they're released on, and new, modern-for-the-time design philosophies.

FRLG has odd decisions littered throughout the game, however; they might not have been bad at the time of release, but they're glaring problems now. Why can you not evolve Kanto Pokémon to their Gen 2 evolutions until after obtaining the National Pokedex, which is post-game? Why can you not trade with non-FRLG Gen 3 games until completing a post-National Pokedex sidequest (if anything, getting the National Pokedex should have been the prereq)? BDSP has some as well but they're not as prevalent and are mostly inherited from DP (not that they should have been to begin with, but regardless).

FRLG has the edge in terms of added new content with entire new areas not found in the original game (or any subsequent one). It also has new designs for various characters, trainer classes, etc. to fit Gen 3's overall artstyle and aesthetic, though I don't personally think they're as substantial on their own.
This isn't to say that BDSP lacks original content, though. Besides mixing in Platinum content, which FRLG didn't do with Yellow at all, BDSP also completely revamp the Underground in a way that is actually useful to most players, and add additional rematches to provide more challenging battles to long time players (which I imagine a decent chunk of people on this forum are).

Where I think BDSP shines the most over FRLG, though (and every game up to Gen 6, tbh), is in its inclusion of QoL improvements that Gen 7 and 8 added to the series as a whole. Box Link means I don't have to bike/fly back to a pokecenter to use my boxes every time. Whole-party Exp Share streamlines the playthrough itself by making me not have to grind nearly as much for the most part. The Poké Radar is improved over even XY's interpretation of it. While there aren't Exp Candies, we still have Mints and Hyper Training, although they aren't as easy to access - but that lack of ease of access is totally negated by HOME support and the further QoL that other HOME-supported games bring, so you'll more likely use mints and exp candies and bottle caps in SV or SwSh, or even evolve certain held item Pokémon in PLA. You can also actually catch and use every Pokémon up to Gen 4 just with BDSP alone - something the older games entirely lacked.

I feel like the only reasons BDSP is overall worse than FRLG for me are its rough launch and the fact that the version on cart is incomplete - but I imagine most probably play with patches installed anyway. I certainly do and I have no reason not to uninstall them. It's still unfortunate for those who can't, though, and I still dislike that.

...I also don't think people are going to be able to buy the original Gen 4 games anytime soon.

For a first time Sinnoh playthrough or even repeat ones, BDSP isn't a bad game, and I think it's still worth a shot even now. Of course, it still has many flaws and I wouldn't recommend it at MSRP for that reason, but then just... don't get it at MSRP. Get it used, or on sale at a retailer.

Well the thing with FRLG is that it's an older game and the first time they did a remake, so I think they were too hesitant to change too much. So they just tried to make the game as similar as possible and didn't want to diverge too much from the originals. That's why you had the maps, Pokemon selection, and most of the dialogue copy/pasted from the originals, that's why you had little added until the post game, etc. As remakes went on and they made more like HGSS and ORAS and started to experiment a bit and did some bolder changes from the originals. But now they've started to revert, presumably because of the time and effort involved in developing high end 3D graphics. I think FRLG's issue is that it didn't age well. It was acceptable for its time, but it's been outdone and doesn't hold up well to more recent games because newer games have been less conservative about their design. BDSP has a very different problem, it's newer but it doesn't compare well to other Switch games. That's probably why people tend to be more lenient with the former than the latter. It would've been difficult to imagine a GBA remake of RBY in 2004 being much better than FRLG turned out to be, but we can easily imagine a 2022 Switch remake of DP being far better than BDSP.

As for the third version stuff being excluded from FRLG. Yellow didn't have a lot different from RB and most of the changes revolved around Pikachu being the starter. So you could argue that was little to nothing Yellow did that was needed. The newer third versions though, they changed a lot more content that made them far larger expansions that weren't really dependent on needing a single version. New areas, roster expansions, new facilities, sidequests, and QoL features, there's a lot of things that could've easily been worked into the remakes but weren't, and I don't buy "this is just a remake of the first two games" as a legitimate excuse. More likely the real reason they weren't included was because they wanted to be quick and cheap and cut corners to get the game out on a strict release schedule.

You know, I think I don't like Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee anymore. Really, it's the capture mechanic that I don't like. I have tried to play it multiple times, but I just quit. I don't want to have to catch hundreds of Pokemon just to level up. I enjoyed it when it was new, but now I don't really care. I have done multiple play throughs of the game (After doing a regular play through, I did several with Ash's Pokemon).

LGPE. The one game I never played and never will (although I did play a demo, and still hated it). I do hate the capture mechanics, but not for the leveling. Having to do Go's dumb motion control mini game instead of actually weaken the Pokemon is what killed it for me (also because of its similarity to the original Yellow, I'm sick of playing RBY for the 17th time). I could never get used to the Go catching mechanics, they weren't the easiest thing in the world to grasp and no matter what I did the throw just seemed to go wrong and the game gave me no feedback on how to make a good throw.

All it would take is a bit of an expanded Nature Preserve, maybe accessible immediately after the League, to give room for the extra species.

More likely anything new would probably be in Entree Forest, which would probably be repurposed in some way since the Dream World probably won't be available.

I'm skeptical they'll even have any expansions though. LGPE had nothing outside of the original 151 except a mythical designed as a Go gimmick, and BDSP didn't have anything outside of the 493 Pokemon that existed at the time of the originals. I think it's a safe prediction to say BW remakes will not have anything more than the original 649.

Heck, I think they go even a bit further and find a new way to disappoint us in this aspect, I don't even think we get all 649 in BW remakes. When since Dexit started have they ever had 649 Pokemon in a game? They've only done so through DLC that they spend an extra year working on, we've never had that many Pokemon at release, so I don't think they can handle including that many in a game anymore. I think instead we only get BW2's 300 in the entire game (maybe with a few transfer only Pokemon as a bonus). Just the 156 5th gen Pokemon in the main game and BW2's expansion in the post game, that's it.

i don't really get the aversion to grinding. i just go watch an episode of something while devoting 3% of my attention to the game. A bit of grinding at the end is vastly preferable to the entire game being a giant snoozefest until the E4. Of course, this wouldn't be an issue at all if GF just gave us the ability to toggle the EXP Share. But GF doesn't seem to like options.

Because grinding is repetitive and time consuming, and playing it while doing something else diminishes the experience. If a game is so boring that you need to go on autopilot and multitask with something else, it's failing its job to entertain you. So why even bother engaging with such an experience? It's a waste of time and money.

 

[Kanjouhi]

All it would take is a bit of an expanded Nature Preserve, maybe accessible immediately after the League, to give room for the extra species.

Literally. It'd be super easy. At the very least, I can pretty easily count on them adding at least the full 649 dex, maybe nyot crossgens since if they did go the HD2D route that'd mean new sprites (the original Gen 5 sprites hold up pretty well syo they could easily reuse them, though I can much more easily see the crossgens getting into these games than I could in BDSP since a lot of them are of mons that you can actually catch in the originals) but if they did that'd still be great.

 

[Kanjouhi]

adding onto my last post, the newer mons I can most realistically see them adding to a possible BW remake are the crossgen evos of base forms of mons that were in the 649 dex (Sylveon, Wyrdeer, Kleavor, Ursaluna, Basculegion, Annihilape, Farigiraf, Dudunsparce and Kingambit), as well as Hisuian forms of mons that were in said dex (and Decidueye/therefore the Rowlet line, because it'd be weird if they only had 2 out of 3 of the Hisui starters), their evolutions and Enamorus. (man, nyow that I think of it, there are a WEIRDLY large amount of LA mons that have connections to/are forms of Unova mons...) Maybe some other post-649 mons too, if they try involving whatever the Indigo Disk plot is gonna be into the postgame (assuming the BW remakes are Gen 9, anyways, since I doubt they'll involve ID into anything if they're Gen 10). And for the Hisui stuff maybe they could add, like, an evo item or something to evolve mons into their Hisuian evolutions/evo forms? I don't know.

 

[Nicolas721]

Here's an opinion that may not be popular, but is certainly controversial:

I want Pokemon to become a single-game series. I don't want dual versions, I don't want third versions, I don't want dual sequels (regular sequels are fine), and I don't want DLC. Now it seems there will be two DLCs, each one you have to pay for, and with two games, that's even more money...This is getting ridiculous. (At least, that's how I understand it.) And yes, I think Pokemon games should be cheaper, so sue me. (This isn't directed at you guys, but at Game Freak/Nintendo/The Pokemon Company/whoever's behind this.)

And I'm also mad at my OCD for making me buy everything. To be fair to Game Freak/Nintendo/The Pokemon Company/whoever's behind this, it's not their fault I have OCD and a compulsive need to have "complete" collection. I'm glad I'm only into a couple of series.

I can sympathize with that, having to trade for Pokemon and evolutions feels very pointless and the lack of a GTS certainly made them more tedious.

A good way to work on your OCD can be thinking that your collection is already incomplete. I assume you do not own the original Japanese Red & Green, nor the multiple games that were Japan-only like the 3DS or mobile apps. Also, you shouldn't pay for Home as one box is enough to make the transferrences, you can store some Pokemon in Gen 8 and others in Gen 9 (unless you have a shiny Pansage or Minior that can't be placed anywhere or be replaced lol).

 

[Kanjouhi]

Also, you shouldn't pay for Home as one box is enough to make the transferrences, you can store some Pokemon in Gen 8 and others in Gen 9 (unless you have a shiny Pansage or Minior that can't be placed anywhere or be replaced lol).

honestly, the home payment stuff wouldn't even be that bad if it was a one-time payment, but it being a subscription service is just a ripoff to me