So I’m trying to replay some gen 3 pokemon. I played Saphire as a kid and I loved it. Going back now as an adult, I’m really struggling. I’m finding it incredibly grindy, and I die inside a little every time I see a long stretch of tall grass. What have I forgotten? What am I missing now that I got as a kid? Any tips?
Free time. Pokemon games are, and always have been, very slow and grindy. Even in the latest entry (Violet) you need to actively avoid encounters since animations take so long
This is my biggest annoyance with Pokemon games, personally. Everything. Takes. So. Fucking. Long. To. Get. To. The. Point. I’m pretty sure 50% of ‘gameplay’ is waiting for fucking animations and waiting for the one or two lines of text at a time to get to the actual important information after telling you about friendship and the joy of raising Pokemon for the 100th time first.
I don’t think that I would ever be able to play these games on the original hardware because being able to fast forward in an emulator is a gift from the gods.
My biggest gripe as well. I’ve got the Pokemon TCG app at the moment and my god it’s impossible to do anything quickly because of all the transitions, animations, and pointless popups that occur.
Just trying to do one thing in the game you literally need to push like 8 popups informing you about something that’s obvious and that you’ve done a thousand times before and you can’t turn it off.
This is why I hate almost all turn based games and these pokemon/final fantasy style random encounter games. Just obnoxious to play.
On the modern games taking forever to get to the point: I’ve been playing the Paper Mario TTYD remake on Switch. Out of curiosity, I watched a little gameplay from the GameCube original… and glory be, does it look snappy. They definitely padded out the animations and stuff in the remake.
That’s why Legends Arceus is my favorite game. Catching Pokémon is a joy instead of a tedious activity to be avoided. I hoped they’d keep the mechanics, maybe next game. I even liked lets go Pikachu more than others because it had a different mechanism at least.
That’s how I’m feeling about final fantasy 7 remake.
No, I don’t want to slowly crawl along the wall, just make the space a little bigger.
No, I don’t want you to force me to slow walk.
No, I don’t want to sometimes have to hold “y” to interact with something.
Thank god it lets me skip the cutscenes.
I just wanted to play through and see the different sections and how it was remade.
It’s so annoying I’m not even looking for gear anymore since I know I’m near the end of the game and none of the stuff carries over to the second part.
I had the same problem. Slow transitions between interactions or conversations, I’m convinced it was made like this by design. It makes the game look longer than it actually is, pretty infuriating.
I suspect you know this already, but the slow walk and slow crawl moments are actually discreet loading screens. The alternative would be always having normal fast movement but then facing black transition loading screens.
Not that I’m stoked to defend FF7R, which I think is a bad bastardization of one of the greatest games of all time, but the slow loading transitions are arguably one of the things FF7R actually does right.
I actually didn’t know that. I guess that makes it a bit more bearable keeping that in mind.
I mean I kind of disagree with this. Pokemon games got slower. Not that the first couple were speed demons or anything, but they got progressively slower. Gen 3 is when it started getting noticeable I think as op is mentioning here, Generation 4 was downright excruciating.
i picked up diamond again a few years ago and was flabberghasted by how slow it was, even compared to the gold and silver remakes. i was using a real cartridge on a real DS but it felt like i was playing in an emulator on a potato. i even disabled attack animations and it didn’t seem to speed things up at all. and then once the games became 3D, forget it, you can pick a move and make a run to the fridge before your turn is over
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl are both WAY slower than Platinum. In particular there’s just a delay between every action and Pokémon losing health in battle is excruciatingly slow. Mostly fixed in Platinum.
The dialogue in SV alone took up half my play through time.