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Discussion Why do so many Nintendo fans dislike Pokemon?

By the way, I'd like to point out that there are a lot of games with Japanese anime aesthetics nowadays, and I think that the core market for such things as Xenoblade and Fire Emblem is still Japan itself.
 
It's the one Nintendo franchise that follows a hard yearly release schedule and from SwSh onwards, that's clearly been harming their production pipeline in ways that make the games feel trite at best and buggy at worst.

Even more innovative games they've made (PLA) still clearly suffered under this (the early game of PLA is awful).

Besides that, Nintendo themselves tend to put Pokemon as separate from their usual brands; Game Freak handles all marketing, Pokemon promotions usually don't show up in the Nintendo Direct (they have their own thing; Pokemon Presents) and just on the whole, Pokemon is treated much more as this broad media franchise that Nintendo happens to own rather than something they're actively involved with. They themselves don't really portray Pokemon as part of the general Nintendo IPs unless it's absolutely unavoidable.

This does make sense; Nintendo's main strength as a company is their IPs and compared to Mario and Zelda, Pokemons IP is much more precarious, being reliant on designers being able to create ~150 new creatures every other year or so while with Mario and Zelda, they can reuse the same designs over and over (there's so much Mario game slop that just uses the same official renders of Mario for character icons).

It just also results in people who are Nintendo fans and people who are Pokemon fans being two separate things.
 
Pokémon is frustrating because it's good despite itself. The core catching Pokémon gameplay loop is, forgive my language, the shit. It will never stop being amazing, and everything else that Game Freak/The Pokémon Company do is make the experience worse for everyone, at least it has been so during this gen. Mediocre graphics, awful performance, and middling world design have muddled what should've been Pokémon's triumphant entry into the HD era. I will leave aside stuff like dexit.

And yet, the Switch games have been bajillion sellers, and there has been some good to go with the bad. Scarlet and Violet have, for better or worse, finally realised a full open-world Pokémon game. The story in gen IX is decent for what is essentially a kids' game. Paradox pokémon are, while OP, a cool way to keep old pokémon fresh in our minds.

It's even more frustrating because there were a lot of steps in the right direction with Pokémon Legends: Arceus, with its Monster Hunter style open-ended areas and its hyper focus on catching pokémon cutting out a lot of the needles fat of the main series. After PL:A, it looked like they could've learnt a few things and made Gen IX the best Pokémon could be. And they didn't.
 
They never caught them all and were never able to move the truck to find Mew.
 
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because they're low quality, especially in front of nintendo's offerings

they can't even use the hardware excuse anymore because on the same console as BotW we have S&S and SV. it's like a full generation worth of difference
 
Aufhebung RPG said:
By the way, I'd like to point out that there are a lot of games with Japanese anime aesthetics nowadays, and I think that the core market for such things as Xenoblade and Fire Emblem is still Japan itself.
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they both sell significantly more overseas now as far as im aware
 
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"Why do so many people dislike the biggest franchise in the world" feels like a question that answers itself. The bigger it is the more likely you'll get to see some random guy on the internet who has a strong opinion on it.
But I will say that every single person I've met in real life who likes Nintendo games ALSO likes Pokemon games, and the Scarlet Violet post-launch controversy the first time I saw someone with a "they fell off with this game tbh..." opinion live too. My anedoctal experience has been nearly 100% positive when it comes to how people view the brand among the Nintendo circle.
In other words, I have absolutely no damn idea of what you mean OP.
 
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For me, a mix between:
A) Skewing younger at times then it did in the first 2 generations. You can stay child oriented, but sometimes it feels more like toddler level story telling.

B) often focus on gimmicks.

C) visuals. Character (and Pokémon for the most part) look ace, but the world is often lacking.

D) music... i honestly never liked it after 8bit, mostly the sound fonts they used. It's fine, but never stays with me.

E) to much nostalgia bait.

D) removal of exploration. Earlier entries where more brutal in letting you enter places you where unprepared or navigating dungeon mazes. On switch, those are gone.

I do have hopes for legends Z, I loved Kalos as a region, and legends was a genuinely great (but flawed cause of gamefreakisms) game, my favourite since bw2/X.
 
I don't dislike Pokemon, I just have very little interest in it nowadays. It's one of those Nintendo series that seems specifically aimed at younger kids when it comes to things like game design, difficulty and storytelling. There is probably a way to make the games more appealing to older, more experienced gamers without making them too complicated for younger players, but I understand Game Freak not wanting to rock the boat too much on that front.
 
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I think gamers in general are just eternally salty that Pokémon games sell many times more than their favorite franchises while not being up to their own quality standards.
 
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Vookatos said:
Personally, I never connected with any monster catching game I've ever played, and Pokemon might not even be the best one of those due to being quite light on story (at least from the ones I've played). If I play any kind of RPG I mostly look forward to experiencing the story or just getting lost in a huge world full of secrets and mysteries, and Pokemon could never provide anything like that (again, from ones I've played. I'm now so disconnected from the series I have no idea how it plays)
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message me in like three years

I wanna see if Grögol Bonanza (the game I'm making that has creature-catching components but is more interested in wandering / discoverable plot threads) scratches that itch

bookmark this post, I'll give it to you for free
 
Not that I dislike Pokémon, but to me it's the Call of Duty if Nintendo franchises. They just churn it out over and over with little to no improvement. It was shocking to actually get to the Legends stage TBH.

The Pokémon Company really need to evolve (lol) the gameplay and the visuals which are several generations behind IMO.

If they focused on one maybe two Pokémon games a console generation that might improve the quality somewhat.
 
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I used to like the franchise, but eventually I came to realize that the underlying mechanics are not engaging enough for what I find enthralling about RPGs, nor do they do a good job of selling the fantasy of having a magical pet after a point.
 
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Going to answer this as someone who used to not be into Pokémon, despite being a kid who was obsessed with everything Nintendo-related - but then got into the games/anime later.

To me back then, the franchise just seemed very "dissonant" from the rest of Nintendo. It was included in Smash Bros and the games were on Nintendo systems, sure - but there were so many other layers to it that other Nintendo franchises didn't have. There was an anime, there was a card game, and so much other content surrounding it. It also had its own fanbase outside of the core Nintendo fans - whereas you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who cares about Metroid that doesn't also care about Mario and Zelda for instance. It seemed to be its own ecosystem entirely outside of the "Nintendo-sphere". So I never engaged with the series until the late 3DS/Switch era, because it just didn't seem like it really belonged with the others.

I think a lot of core "Nintendo" fans still hold this mentality, whether they've engaged with the franchise or not. Pokémon is just in its own world, which is honestly the truth to a certain extent.
 
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Hate Pokémon?

Nah. I think it’s mostly fans falling out of love with the series. Personally I still like the series, but after Sword and Shield released I chose to go with a pause with the games.

And I’m someone who got Red on launchday back in ‘99 ;)
 
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It's mostly because of the N64, and to a certain extent the GameCube. The library of the former was severely lacking in RPGs and other "reflective" experiences, AKA chill non-action games like VNs and classic adventure games, not only compared to the Saturn and the PSX, but the SNES as well. There was a certain cope among N64 fans, Nintendo's marketing teams and even Yamauchi himself that the N64 had a more "quality over quantity" library over its rivals. RPGs like Final Fantasy were for shuttered NEETs and gigachads preferred to play a very limited number high-fidelity action games like Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time over the entire trilogies of games that the PSX offered (it's certainly possible that this is how the marketing gimmick of the "AAA game" was born).

The smugness of the N64 fans and their disturbing adoration for a pair of games: SM64 and OoT, still has influence on what Nintendo fans see as "good" or bad games. This is the reason for why it was common during the DS/Wii and the 3DS/WiiU generation to hear that Nintendo had lost its touch, and now in the Switch era it's why some confidently claim that the only good games in the console are Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, and that everything else is cheap crap.

Pokémon RPGs just have a very different appeal to what this millennial, forum dwelling audience considers "good". The series is not action-adventure and they have been exclusive to filthy pleb portables for most of its existence. The fact that Pokémon RPGs encourage multiplayer is a possible factor, which could also explain why Splatoon is also despised and overlooked in many Nintendo communities, despite being very polished 3D action games on the vein of Zelda or 3D Mario.

Furthermore, Game Freak is very far from the graphic powerhouse that Nintendo internal teams are. Nintendo first-party studios are some of the most important pioneers of 3D gaming, while GF released its first full 3D RPG just over 10 years ago. When GF released LGPE (a title in which the studio required the help of Niantic), Nintendo internal teams were already well-versed in HD development.

Now it's true that the N64 had its fair share of Pokémon content, but most of the praise is directed at Pokémon Snap which is, to the surprise of nobody, an action game! Pokémon Stadium was very well received back in the day, but the main attraction about those games was to see Charizard with the largest amount of polygons, not the gameplay.

EDIT: singling the N64 and GCN was not very wise of my part, but my point is that there was a significant amount of period that lasted from the launch of the N64 to Operation Rainfall on the Wii, when Nintendo home consoles were lacking in RPGs and a whole generation of Nintendo fans was alienated with the genre. Handhelds were a different story, but for some reason those have a smaller presence in the Internet.
 
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Yzz said:
It's mostly because of the N64, and to a certain extent the GameCube. The library of the former was severely lacking in RPGs and other "reflective" experiences, AKA chill non-action games like VNs and classic adventure games, not only compared to the Saturn and the PSX, but the SNES as well. There was a certain cope among N64 fans, Nintendo's marketing teams and even Yamauchi himself that the N64 had a more "quality over quantity" library over its rivals. RPGs like Final Fantasy were for shuttered NEETs and gigachads preferred to play a very limited number high-fidelity action games like Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time over the entire trilogies of games that the PSX offered (it's certainly possible that this is how the marketing gimmick of the "AAA game" was born).

The smugness of the N64 fans and their disturbing adoration for a pair of games: SM64 and OoT, still has influence on what Nintendo fans see as "good" or bad games. This is the reason for why it was common during the DS/Wii and the 3DS/WiiU generation to hear that Nintendo had lost its touch, and now in the Switch era it's why some confidently claim that the only good games in the console are Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, and that everything else is cheap crap.

Pokémon RPGs just have a very different appeal to what this millennial, forum dwelling audience considers "good". The series is not action-adventure and they have been exclusive to filthy pleb portables for most of its existence. The fact that Pokémon RPGs encourage multiplayer is a possible factor, which could also explain why Splatoon is also despised and overlooked in many Nintendo communities, despite being very polished 3D action games on the vein of Zelda or 3D Mario.

Furthermore, Game Freak is very far from the graphic powerhouse that Nintendo internal teams are. Nintendo first-party studios are some of the most important pioneers of 3D gaming, while GF released its first full 3D RPG just over 10 years ago. When GF released LGPE (a title in which the studio required the help of Niantic), Nintendo internal teams were already well-versed in HD development.

Now it's true that the N64 had its fair share of Pokémon content, but most of the praise is directed at Pokémon Snap which is, to the surprise of nobody, an action game! Pokémon Stadium was very well received back in the day, but the main attraction about those games was to see Charizard with the largest amount of polygons, not the gameplay.
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This was good stuff. You almost had me with the first line but only because at this point I’ve seen wilder takes about almost every Nintendo platform on Fami :)
 
Personally I love the franchise and its core gameplay. Though unfortunately it doesn't have the same "seal of quality" of Nintendo internal studios. At least in this current moment.
 
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I still like the concept of Pokemon. Used to love the OG games as a kid. I hugely dislike the lack of effort and polish they've put into the last few generations of mainline games. It's baffling to me how they continue to stagnate in quality with the huge amount of funds they have.
 
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I think a sufficiently good game can transcend genre preferences. I don't tend to play visual novels, JRPGs, or roguelikes but I adore Ace Attorney, Xenoblade and Hades.

The really good Pokemon games are some of the most enjoyable RPGs ever made, accessible for children but with enough variety and choice that you can have a good time, with memorable setpieces and an interesting world.

Recently only Legends Arceus has scratched the itch for me. I wouldn't attribute all my personal enjoyment to nostalgia, I just did a playthrough of Yellow - a game that released when I was months old - and was beaming the entire time.
 
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I think if they just made games like pla (with just 1 version because we are done with the 2 version cash grab nonsense) and took extra time with it (5-6 years not 3, so combine the teams and stop with the cod scheduling) the series would be way more popular with everyone.
 
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For me it represents a lot of lost potential. I really wish that Nintendo had an ongoing JRPG franchise in their wheelhouse positioned as a solid competitor to the others like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, where each release feels like a flagship title that will tell a unique engaging story, but they kinda turned it into a sort of pseudo sports franchise where new games feel more like an update to the previous, while also kinda missing that mark by always losing some content and features along the way.
 
So I can't speak for anyone else, but for me personally the magic died with Sw/Sh. To put it as briefly as I can (since I'm liable to write an essay if I don't), it completely failed to make the most of a jump to a much more powerful console and failed to innovate enough mechanically or narratively to make up for it. My character had so little narrative motivation to become Champion compared to anyone else that I actively tried to lose to Marnie in the final tournament (you're not allowed to lose, you have to do it over). I don't know how they had the nerve to ask for £27 for DLC after that.

And then they fumbled BD/SP hard. Diamond was my first Pokémon game and probably my second RPG (after a GBA game associated with a franchise we're not allowed to talk about). What I wanted was HG/SS in Sinnoh, but I would have accepted OR/AS in Sinnoh. I didn't get either. I got hot trash and I took it personally.

And then S/V came out and it was a buggy mess that didn't let me wear a skirt. The foundation was great and it had good ideas, but the lack of polish really showed, at least on release. It needed another nine months or so in the oven to be truly ready. You just can't fix stuff like the gym leaders not scaling with your level if you do them out of order in a patch, it's not that simple. Some people are going to get mad. It's too late. You fucked up. I don't care about Unova.

Arceus was the best Pokémon game for years, but I have basically no interest in Kalos so I can't see myself picking up Z-A.

So in short, it's less of a dislike and more of a lack of faith at this point. They keep focusing on things I don't care about instead of things I do, and it's consistent.
 
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Honestly this thread confuses me. Is this really a thing that's that common on Famiboards? There definitely has been a lot of negativity in Pokemon threads, but it's mostly been from fans or ex-fans, and would you really consider that the same as outright hate? I wouldn't. Honestly most of the time people complain about something with the Nintendo community it doesn't even feel like something that's happening on Famiboards.

Anyways I don't hate Pokemon but I'm mostly disinterested in them. They're not particularly well made games.
 
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I feel that people confuse critique for hate and negativity.

We aren't supposed to be a positive just for the safe of being positive. A shit product is a shit product.

I want to love Pokemon so badly but the quality of the games have been so extremely disappointing to me. Let's Go was the last game I enjoyed. The rest of the Switch generation was a complete and utter shit show on the Switch. Playing Violet actually made me physically ill because of the atrocious framerate.

It's just very embarrassing considering the money they rake in. They just want to invest as little as possible in the games.
 
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