(Note: This will be largely tl;dr for a lot of people. Those with short attention spans need not read further.)
Pokémon is a pretty successful franchise - thirteen years and it's still running strong. However,
Pokémon as a game - and we're talking main-series adventure games here, not
Mysterious Dungeon,
Ranger,
Pinball, or the various other spin-offs -
sucks. There are various reasons for this, many of which I'll detail below.
StagnationThe
Pokémon games I'm talking about are traditional
slooooooow JRPGs. Standard turn-based battle system, level-grinding, square grid-based overworld, incredibly linear - come on, even
Dragon Quest has deviated a bit from that ancient formula for a while now!
LegendariesEveryone knows about the special class of Pokémon usually referred to as "legendaries" - a bird trio and two incredible psychics in first-gen; a beast trio, two birds, and a grass elemental with control over time in second-gen; a trio of golems, a trio of powerful monsters with control over the weather, two playful dragons, a elusive wish-granter, and an alien in third-gen; and God knows what in fourth-gen. There are thirty-five legendaries in all, almost all of which can now be caught through regular gameplay throughout the five fourth-gen games (including some as part of the main storyline). Shouldn't legendaries be, y'know,
legendary? In a way other than stats?
Too Many Pokémon, Can't Catch 'Em AllAs of fourth-gen, there are 493 unique Pokémon species. In third-gen, to be able to complete the Pokédex (a major post-game goal for many players) without trading with other players, one had to own all five main-series third-gen releases, two GameCube games, and a GBA-to-GCN cable. A player wishing to complete the Pokédex in fourth-gen (again, without trading with other players, including WFC) must own all three major releases, plus a spin-off and two games that haven't been released in the US yet.
Pokémon stopped being fun (or inexpensive) for completionists after first-gen.
Hacking And PiracyUsing cheating devices or otherwise hacking to obtain advantages is present in most games, but it's especially prominent in
Pokémon, enough so that out-of-the-box compatibility with the latest
Pokémon release is a commonly-advertised feature of many cheating devices. Additionally, no copy-protection has been implemented in a main-series
Pokémon game yet, so they're easily among the most pirated games on Nintendo's handhelds in addition to being some of the best-selling games.
MultiplayerCan you honestly say you'd praise a
Pokémon game for its multiplayer? This isn't a well-crafted fighting game, real-time-strategy game, or first-person shooter. It's a turn-based RPG (and, in fourth-gen, a boring form of capture-the-flag). They somehow hold serious-business tournaments for these games, despite being largely unbalanced (enough that seventeen monsters are banned outright from standard tournament use, the equivalent of one out of twenty-nine selectable characters in a fighting game being hard-banned) and not particularly fun in multiplayer.
All some pretty glaring problems. At least two of them plague almost any long-running popular series, but
Pokémon has this problem where the developers have made no effort to even slightly fix most of these problems. And why should they? As long as people keep buying these games, they don't need to change the formula, right? So they'll never make the following changes...
Change Up The Formula, Just A Little BitThis isn't even that hard. Keeping it turn-based is fine. Ditch the grid, though. Use a better leveling system, or make grinding more rewarding - even rare loot drops from defeating monsters that carry items would be an improvement, as long as it doesn't lead to the inclusion of fetch quests. Open the world up a bit - instead of roadblocks and the HM system preventing you from getting to the next city, why not just allow you to go wherever you want (the Surf requirement to get to islands excluded), but not compensate for your lower level at all? (The system with unresponsive Pokémon if you don't have a badge allowing you to control them would definitely need to remain in place.) Just take some inspiration from other JRPGs.
Make Legendaries Legendary (And Change The Save System While You're At It)Another easy fix. First off, ditch the Master Ball entirely. No more "oh, hey, I don't want to bother with fighting this guy, I'll just use the item with a 100% catch rate" going on. You have to work for your legendaries. Second, make it so legendaries aren't always there. To use the set-up from the first-gen games as an example, when you reach a legendary Pokémon's den, it'll be there, and you have one chance to face it; there was also one Pokémon that could only be legitimately obtained through a special Nintendo event. Scrap all that. Instead, with the bird trio, you have a 25% chance of that particular bird being there on that playthrough. If it's there, that's the bird you'll have a chance at getting; otherwise, you get a Nugget. Have it be even lower for Mewtwo (let's say 10% chance of it being there, and a Rare Candy or something otherwise), and have Mew roam the land with a one-in-67,108,864 encounter rate. In that example, there's a chance at getting exactly one bird (not your choice which), a lower chance at exactly one Mewtwo, and a very slim chance (but always a chance) of obtaining a Mew. This is the part of this scenario where everyone complains about it
really being impossible to complete the Pokédex without trading. Three words:
New. Game. Plus. You'd be able to start a new file in which your Pokémon from the previous game are locked away until you defeat the Elite Four Champion (added bonus if the game is programmed so that the Champion uses the exact party used to defeat the previous Elite Four). Reroll for legendaries and make it so that everything can be accomplished with a single copy of the game with enough time and effort. Also: you can only load from a particular save once (
Diablo-style, not
NetHack-style) - try to load from it again and it starts you back at the last Pokémon Center (with some sort of other punishment, though definitely not the "you lose all your money" thing
Diablo II does). Also also: it autosaves for legendary battles (as with secret base battles in third-gen), so whatever happens happens regardless of whatever you might try to do to get out of an undesirable outcome.
Just Introduce A New Land Next Time, And Bring Back All Of The Old PokémonNo more new Pokémon, or keep it under fifty if you
absolutely have to include them, and make sure every single one uses a type combination we've never seen before if that's the case. Instead of crafting all sorts of new Pokémon, craft yet another new world, and make it so that
every single Pokémon can be caught in this new world. Put it a decade or more after second- and fourth-gen. Connect it to the old lands with news clippings, television stories, books, and other sorts of things that show that the old places still exist, but they're way different from here (and make sure to document the kinds of things that might have changed there during the elapsed time). The only things that could be compared to the other lands would be the gym system (though it could have a lot more than eight badges) and the Elite Four (which could also be increased for a harder boss gauntlet).
Anti-Hacking And Anti-PiracyThis is where suddenly a lot of people get overly defensive about cheating in a video game. My standpoint? If the game detects that the save file has been altered by outside forces (such as a Pokésav equivalent or an Action Replay)? Have it corrupt the save file and scold the player. (If you
really think this is too harsh a punishment - though it's seriously not - the game can warn the player the first time they do it and then corrupt the save file if more changes are detected.) Put in a copy-protection check at the file creation screen and after every gym leader battle (and code each check slightly differently as to make it harder to get around the protection); if a check fails at the new game screen, put a BAD EGG (or equivalent) in the player's party and fill every storage box with BAD EGGs (so that the player can't just dump the BAD EGG into a box to deal with it), and if it fails elsewhere, turn every Pokémon in the player's party except one into a BAD EGG and do as before with the storage boxes (and transform every Pokémon already in storage into a BAD EGG). Program it in such a way that if one tries to hack it out of the game (whether through an Action Replay code or hex-editing the ROM) it activates the anti-hacking stuff and automatically corrupts the save file. Figure out some way to code it so that it would be so much work to crack as to not be worth it.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story's copy-protection was a big deal because it checked
twice (once at the file select screen and once at the first boss fight), so take that even further.
Improve MultiplayerThere are many,
many ways this could be done, and I'm not going to bother detailing more than two of them.
Bring Back Pokémon Stadium
VersusSince no experience is earned from multiplayer, there's no real reason to use player-trained Pokémon - so don't. Instead, introduce a versus mode with a system similar to one from the
Pokémon Stadium titles. In this mode, each player would be able to pick a party of six Pokémon from a pool of
all of them. Each Pokémon would have a choice of a predetermined moveset based on its types (for the lazy or those in a hurry) or a player-made moveset (from a pool of whatever attacks that Pokémon could learn naturally, via TM, or through one generation of breeding; some amount of these player-made movesets could be saved), and all Pokémon in this mode would be at the same level (likely either level 50 or level 100). Now, this would make some people angry -
after all, they went to all the effort of breeding Pokémon to cause some destruction, and here's a game mode that takes the work out of creating some decent combinations - but these Pokémon wouldn't be EV-trained or anything, and the standard versus modes would still be present for those people.
Introduce Co-OpThe other multiplayer idea is (competitive) co-op. Remember the sections in fourth-gen where you could team up with an NPC for double-battling? Well, have something like that, but multiplayer. Have special co-op dungeons with high-level Pokémon and good rewards at the end. Players could stay together and double-battle, or they could explore separately and deal with the stronger monsters on their own, but one could also reach the end first and have the loot all to himself. Also, this mode would give experience from battles and allow players to catch Pokémon (possibly with some special way for one player to distract a monster in a double battle so that the other player could catch it or the other monster without knocking either of them out).
So yeah, none of those changes would probably ever be introduced into an official
Pokémon release, though change is all but necessary at this point. For a fan game, though, or yet another game to try to compete with
Pokémon? Many of these changes (excepting the anti-piracy for a fan game, obviously) could make for something really great.
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