T. K. Arispe

 Couple old Pokémon illustrations.

Having just finished Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and started Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (the Switch remaster, which makes me feel really really old because I played the original when it first came out), I've had game design on the brain. It got me to pondering what Pokémon can do better moving forward, so we don't get another title with the weaknesses of Scarlet and Violet.

I was thinking about why it is that most Super Mario and Zelda games are so excellent, and then I realized just how tightly and intentionally designed they are. In reading interviews with the development teams for these games, I noticed that they really approach games, first and foremost, as games--as interactive experiences meant to be rewarding, satisfying, and fun. 

For the Nintendo developers, video games are not primarily a storytelling medium or a glorified tech demo or a moneymaking venture or what have you. Their intent is to create something that is enjoyable to play in every detail. From the brilliant visual design language of the world of Breath of the Wild, to the sleek controls of Super Mario platformers, it's clear that the developers' aim is to craft an experience that you won't want to put down. They know that, at the end of the day, a game can have a mind-blowing storyline or top-of-the-line graphics, but if the gameplay required to access those things is subpar, most of the appeal is lost.

And I think that's an approach all game developers would be wise to keep in mind. If your primary goal is to tell a story, I think you're better off writing a novel or filming a movie. If your primary goal is to showcase some hardware capabilities, why not cut out the programming middleman and just make a tech demo without the cobbled-on gameplay? And if your primary goal is to make money... you may want to reevaluate your life, because gamers can smell a cash grab a mile away.

I believe a large part of the reason Scarlet and Violet suffered is because they were trying to ride the coattails of both Breath of the Wild and their own IP, and kinda forgot to also actually be fun. It's totally understandable that Breath of the Wild was so moldbreaking and innovative that many developers began to move in similar directions afterward, but as I expressed in an earlier post, what made BotW stand out wasn't just its overall gameplay model, but all the design details it got right. You cannot simply say to yourself "I'm making a massive-overworld action RPG, so of course it'll be a hit". Scarlet and Violet were just trying way too hard to ride the Breath of the Wild train.

Plus, I get that Pokémon has been around for a while now, and with each successive game the developers probably feel a lot of pressure to create something that will top the last game and be familiar enough to not alienate fans, but also innovative enough to stay interesting and relevant. But, as I expressed previously, Scarlet and Violet just didn't have a lot of that personality that makes the Pokémon games so appealing in the first place. I feel like they got so caught up in frills like battle-mechanics minutia, milking Terastallization for all it was worth (which was honestly not much), and just trying to create the most massive Pokémon game ever, that the resulting overall experience is at times almost painfully bland. Like, I don't want to reach a town and the only building I can enter is the Gym. That's just kind of depressing.

I believe that if Game Freak develops Pokémon games with an eye for what actually made the games successful in the first place - a vibrant world that possesses both breadth and depth, an engaging but not overly complicated battle system that is accessible to all skill levels, and thoughtfully-crafted creatures and characters that have a something-for-everyone sort of appeal - they can tweak whatever else they want about Pokémon, and still end up with a really good game.

In fact, this is exactly what they did with Legends: Arceus, where they radically changed the gameplay model, simplified the battle system, and even took the story setting in a previously unexplored direction... and it was awesome. That's more of what I want to see from Game Freak. I'm really hoping Legends: Z-A will build on this, and I also hope more conventional Pokémon titles in the future will go back to the series's creative roots. Hardware may improve over the years, but the basic psychology of what makes games fun is timeless.