Oh yeah, I forgot to say--I'd also like to see the pokémon themselves take a more active role, not just as battling partners, and it might be cool to select one pokémon to follow you around, especially if they made it into an MMORPG. Hee, that would be awesome. ^^
About the ONLY thing those games lacked was the exploration feeling. But there's just as much you can do with a mostly desert-based Region.
...
They wanted people to use Pokémon that appear way too late in the handhelds, and to have a limited pool to choose from. To try new things instead of the usual and linear way the handhelds work. No GYMs and Elite Four for once? As good as it gets.
I really missed the exploration, to tell you the truth. A desert is one of the best places to go exploring--there are so many possibilities for hidden caves and ruins and things. I did like that they provided odd pokémon to use--a lot of the pokémon I used in XD I was playing through with for the first time. I missed the gyms because they provided such so much experience and money, and I missed collecting badges, but I didn't mind them doing something different.
I agree... to an extent. First off, Cipher is about the ONLY Team of the ENTIRE franchise to pose an actual threat.
I don't know about that. The rockets in Johto were going to make all the pokémon in the region go nuts with a radio signal or something, weren't they? Aqua/Magma ended up messing with the -weather- when they let Kyogre and Groudon out, which could have had catastrophic consequences for the region. I'd say that's vaguely more threatening than giving pokémon a new type and moves and dropping a ship in the desert.
That's the way the Pokémon games work.
I'm not sure what you're talking about there, but in the handheld games, the battles go along at a great speed. Stadium/Colo/XD drives me crazy because you have to look at every single pokémon in turn, as they're released, as they perform a move, as it hits... It seems simple to me to expand the camera's field of view and to make the animations overlap (i.e. we see both pokémon come out at the same time, get hit by surf, etc. at the same time) and also to shorten some animations (in some cases the "hit-recovery" and "faint" animations are annoyingly long). Just some little changes like that would make the game much more enjoyable.
But what are you going to do? It was a first step in a darker world for a kiddy franchise. No one expected to pull it off right.
And XD? Step two: a little better, but still disappointing. How many games do I have to wait? I guess I didn't realize that a franchise's becoming kiddy-aligned completely stunts their ability to come out with something more serious. What? I played through all of the pokémon company's highly entertaining games and enjoyed their 'experiments' (Snap, Puzzle League, etc.), so when they come out with another new game I'm supposed to expect that it'll be mediocre?
As for them being weak...
I didn't say they were weak, I said they weren't threatening. In that same vein, I didn't have much trouble with any of the bosses--not fainting while I whittled down the shadow pokémon's HP so I could capture them was always the hardest part for me, but it was nice that they didn't do the one-type thing in Colo/XD.
I can't see how they weren't a threat. At least they were much more of a threat than the handheld "bosses". And the Peons were meant for comic relief. At least in XD. Much like the grunts in all handheld Teams...
They weren't a threat because they weren't threatening in and of themselves, and their plans didn't come close to fruition, aside from giving some random trainers shadow pokémon. "I'm going to create an invincible army of shadow pokémon" isn't a bad plan, but when the answer to "oh really? how many do you have so far?" is "oh, just one", it sort of lacks force.
The pokémon teams don't count--personally, I don't feel any connection between the team and the sprite standing behind them. I don't go, "durr he has six shadow pokémon, I'm shaking in my boots", I go, "lolz, he looks like buddha, only evil. Oh look, shadow pokémon." The peons were comic relief? Relief from what? Strikes me the whole game was 'comic relief'. And no, they're in rather a different style than the other games--okay, aqua's uniforms weren't that great, but magma grunts were all hooded and the rockets had their caps and dark uniforms. They weren't very scary, no, but they had a certain finesse, whereas I have nothing but contempt for power ranger-wannabes and their starched scarves.
The people do look a bit too skinny and slightly sloppy, but I guess they didn't want to lose the cartoon feeling. And it also adds and element of both fun and maturity...
Sloppiness and cartoony models adds an element of maturity?
The recycling of Pokémon models... all companies do this when there's no need to remake it all. I do believe there should've been more effort, and they should look like they looked like in SSBM. But it's fine as-is. Graphics are aesthetics at the end. No need to be so picky...
Graphics aren't the be-all and end-all of a game, but when it lacks a lot of other elements that I find enjoyable, I find myself moving down the list: "Plot? Kind of. Gameplay? Annoying, but better than Colo. Graphics? Pretty meh." If it was -pretty- it might have distracted me for a little while from its more lackluster elements, and if its story and/or gameplay were amazing I would have forgotten completely about the graphics. However, it was pretty mediocre on all accounts, so things that could have been ignored became points of contention.
I find Colosseum/XD "dark" enough. Unless you want to see gore and invincible villains. Which is actually never happening. But when compared with the handhelds attire, I can say the GCN games succeeded beyond words...
When I say 'dark', I mean something in the vein of, say, a Final Fantasy game--where things happen and have serious consequences, and where people act like people, not lame cardboard anime characters.
Gore and invincible villains? Please. That's not dark, that's an action movie. Attire? I didn't know game cartriges wore clothes. In any case, though, Colo/XD were an interesting deviation from the norm, but I found them less enjoyable than the "boring" handheld games because all elements of gameplay suffered.
If you liked them, that's cool, but I just wish they'd come out with something I liked better.
P.S. Your overuse of ellipses is incredibly annoying, Orion. A period/full stop works just as well, if not better.
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