Then you're quite slow with the type matchups. I can generally reach a score of 16 (maximum individual score) within about 115 seconds, with 65 seconds still on the clock. My best individual score is 24, but I know of someone who manages even higher scores than that. You can also get group score to one star by playing on your own, no other mission has that.
It's not too important though, in USUM missions are far from the best way to farm FC. Interacting with Plaza guests with red names is far more efficient, you can get over 400 FC on a single lap interacting with 10 guests, and that's prior to fortune teller boosts. Fortune Tellers also barely affect gains from missions, but they flat out multiply the FC gains from interacting with guests or the Battle Agency. When you get a quadrupler you can get over 1600 FC in a matter of minutes interacting with guests, and you can repeat that every hour, I've got a stock of about a quarter million FC from it.
Perhaps I am pretty slow with the type matchups. Maybe I'm also in too much of a hurry and slow myself down as I run from player to player and sit through the Alola waving. (I think my highest score is 21.) Though I must admit the other reason I moved on to the other ones is because I get bored easily, and Type Matchups got really tiring after a while and I wanted a change of pace.
And yeah, my preferred way of getting large amounts of FC is Battle Agency. Problem is that it's so hard to find people who actually have worthwhile Pokémon to use. Most of them hardly ever play Battle Agency, so I've gotten kind of stuck when computer players are bringing out Pokémon with useful moves that go well with their stats while I find people with, say, Alolan Marowak with Rain Dance and Thunder.
So if the guide says around 500 Pokemon in the Galar Dex that makes it the biggest regional dex, Great but there's a huge difference here, There's no National Dex.
Lets say that Including gigantamax forms and regional forms (Which Alcreamie gets 20+ of) we get 125 or so new pokemon, That leaves 375 Pokemon of previous generations to fill up the rest of the Dex. Meaning Over 400 Pokemon from previous Generations wont be appearing in the game.
I don't know how these books work, but I doubt Gigantamax will take up quite the same amount of space as a regular Pokémon. A Gigantamax Pokémon's moves will be based on the moves the Pokémon could learn in its normal state. It'd be like with Mega Evolutions--they're different forms of a Pokémon, but the only functional differences are their stats, most of the time different Abilities, and sometimes different stats. But the core way you'd breed and raise one will still be the same and they will have the very same moves they can learn. I wouldn't see it practical to have more space for text for a Gigantamax Pokémon than, say, its artwork.
I really feel the need to jump in here and say that they clearly aren’t going to devote 26+ pages purely to Alcremie forms. It will get 1 page like the rest of the Pokémon. Maybe 2 pages if the forms are somehow different by more than just the colour palette, which they won’t be.
It doesn’t matter whether there’s 300, 400 or 500 Pokémon in the Galar dex. It’s sadly going to put constraints on team building which won’t be much fun for those in the competitive scene. Assuming we get 400 Pokémon, that would give you maybe 8 final stage fire Pokémon to choose from? Maybe you want a key ability like Intimidate or Swift Swim or Lightning Rod. You might get 2 of each option to choose from? Maybe you want a cleric or hazard setter? You might get 3 choices for those?
Basically it’s going to make teams very predictable and repetitive. Even in a casual setting. And yes previous VGC rules have always had limited choices for which Pokémon are allowed. But this is different. This effects egg moves and breeding chains. This effects people who battle outside of VGC rules. And we don’t even know how long the Dexit will last for. It could be permanent. Up until now we usually have a restricted Pokédex for the first year of the VGC rules for each new gen, and then the second year everything is included. That doesn’t seem likely anymore.
Depends on if you consider me as "competitive" or not, but I always build my first few teams based strictly on what's available in the Regional Pokédex, so this isn't going to bother me much.
I don't think it's going to be quite as bad in the long term as you think though. They are well aware of the negative response to not having every Pokémon available, and no doubt this has already affected how they'll plan out future games.
Those complaints just reinforce the notion that trying to bring Pokemon Go's audience into the main games was a fool's errand to begin with. There's a reason why the Go audience is so disconnected from the fandom, it's because they have very different expectations out of a video game than traditional console and handheld gamers. Mobile gamers are extremely casual and just looking for a quick distraction, of course they'd be overwhelmed by learning the mechanics of moves and typings and things of that nature. Most of that audience was never interested enough in video games to spend $360 on a dedicated gaming device + a Pokemon game nor were they interested in spending hundreds of hours on an RPG like Pokemon. That market just isn't very compatible with the main series on a fundamental level.
A healthy fanbase is one in which new people are constantly coming in, because in all fanbases, people are constantly leaving. New blood keeps the whole thing alive.
Pokémon GO is the biggest source of new blood in Pokémon for a long time, possibly the second biggest in the franchise's history after the initial craze. From the perspective of The Pokémon Company, it would thus make sense to see if they can get this wave of newcomers into the central part of the franchise. I don't know how successful they were at it--people I've met who got into
Pokémon GO and picked up
Let's Go have been split 50-50 between entering the main series and it being too complicated for them.
That being said, bear in mind the rave reviews
Let's Go got. Why did these game reviewers love
Let's Go so much? Because they are not Pokémon fans. They don't have in-depth knowledge of how Pokémon games work, how they're structured, or what you're supposed to do when you begin. What they do know is basic video game logic and patterns derived from playing other games, and
Let's Go turned out to be much more approachable to them. This is the audience that
Let's Go managed to pick up. And a lot of these reviewers talk about interest in trying out the main series.
Let's Go is a gateway game, a transitional one, though it looks to me like it picked up a different audience than the one originally intended.
Best way to go about DLC would probably be something like New Super Luigi U, release the DLC along with the expanded version and let people choose which way they want to go. That way the people that already bought the original would be more interested in buying the upgrades and people that skipped it or feel like double dipping (maybe to use another team or what have you) can buy the full size game.
Yep, I think that's the best way to go about it. I just wanted to point out that decisions that may appear baffling to non-Japanese people make more sense in the context of Japanese video game culture, one of them being a preference of physical copies over DLC (though to be fair, there are many aspects of Japanese video game culture that baffle me). Game Freak, despite them caring very much about international appeal, seems to still be very much rooted in how Japanese gamers function.
The reluctance toward digital might be changing though, as the wild success of
Undertale as of late might indicate. Nevertheless, Japan gets physical releases of games that are normally only avaialble digitally, like
Tetris 99,
Skullgirls, and
Lethal League Blaze (all of which have September-October 2019 releases on the Switch). Digital is still available there, of course.
I'm not trying to mock them, it's just very surprising, that's all. If you're that interested in Pokemon that you bothered to join a dedicated forum for Pokemon, an environment full of dedicated fans, odds are you've probably been exposed to some other games in some form. Some random casual that doesn't really pay much attention to video games, I might be able to see that. But it's harder to believe that someone in an environment like this hasn't at least heard of some of the more well known video game releases outside of Pokemon.
Believe me, it was hard for me to comprehend when I encountered someone on YouTube whose knowledge of video gaming is so limited to Pokémon that he had never heard of most major releases for video games. I don't really know how it happened. The way he described 2-D platforming though, it sounded like he was familiar with the concept of that genre but not what it's called (consistently calling it "game(s) where you run and jump to the right" and calling 3-D platformers "game(s) where you move forward in three-dimensional space"). He had never heard of
Super Mario Odyssey, only recently heard of
Super Mario Galaxy, and could not recognize any Mario characters other than Mario himself, not even Luigi.
In this case, though, I wonder if it's not that someone is unfamiliar with
Breath of the Wild but of the initials "BOTW." I mean, I've been in fandoms where people would throw out acronyms like "STTNG" and I'd be confused for a little bit--until I look further into it and find that it refers to
Star Trek: The Next Generation, one of the most famous science fiction TV shows ever but very rarely abbreviated down to its initials outside of specific fan circles. (Acronym Finder rates "Breath of the Wild" as 5 stars in search importance though, which is higher than I had expected.)
Are we playing the same game? Pokemon's stories tend to feel almost exactly like that. Sure, you might have the evil team have some semblance of a recurring narrative, but they're not exactly necessary to the story and the story doesn't really get that serious until the end. They could easily rearrange or interchange some of the parts to the story and still make it work. Or just make most of the plot optional except for the climax.
They can still have this level of progression with an open world game, they just need to base it around distance, not progress. While players can go anywhere they want in an open world, the progression can still be controlled to some degree with smart world design. For one, players will always start in the same spot, so the areas closer to the starting area are the first ones they're likely to encounter. So they can place the more basic Pokemon types and trainer classes there. Second, players are most likely to be drawn by easily visible landmarks, so whatever jumps out at them first is most likely their next destination and conversely, whatever is well hidden is probably going to take them longer to find. They can use this to their advantage to create an intended order to progress through the game while still keeping it open ended for people who want to veer off and do what they want. They did this to some degree in older Pokemon games when you could choose the order of some gyms. You could do things like skip Lt. Surge and Erika, fight Blaine 4th, fight Pryce before Chuck and Jasmine, or fight Crasher Wake before Maylene or Fantina (Pt). But did most people do that? Probably not. Those gym leaders are usually fought in the order that they are because the path taken to reach them is more appealing/desirable than the alternative. They can do the same thing on a larger scale with open worlds, having the intended paths be shorter, clearer, and safer than the ones that aren't, but still give players the choice to be a little more daring if they want to.
It would be neat to see how a Pokémon game like you envisioned would play out, though I would still say that open world games could cause problems if Game Freak chooses to go for a more story-heavy direction. One example that comes to mind is Lillie and everything related to her. She has moments of character growth and development that are tied to particular locations, such as encountering an Ultra Wormhole near Heahea City, working up the courage to go back to Aether Foundation, and bonding with the player character on Exeggutor Island. (And, in the Ultra games, becoming a Pokémon trainer and partnering with the player character when they reach Rainbow Rocket HQ.) It wouldn't work quite as well if done out of order.
Something like the early games, or
X and Y, where you're given the plot, then told to go at it, could work that way, but it looks like for
Sword and Shield, there are several side characters who look like they have their own stories to tell, and some of whom may accompany you at certain points (such as that rumored challenge where you have to catch a lot of Pokémon). This could feasibly be done with a story like with
Black and White, where the villains' story bits with you were largely unrelated to what Pokémon they were using or where they were located, though that moment when Alder has you defeat the little kids with Pokémon much, much lower-leveled than yours to demonstrate a point about taking battling too seriously might be trouble if someone gets there too early.
I still wonder how leveling would work though or gathering of HMs and HM-equivalents (like Poké Ride or those Eevee/Pikachu powers). There's already a sort of Metroidvania element to that (though downplayed in regions from Unova and onward) in that getting new overworld skills lets you open up more paths, where higher-leveled Pokémon reside and the next parts of the story happen. Certainly, there's a bit of trouble with
Let's Go in which avid Pokédex collectors could face Sabrina as soon as they reach Saffron City--and promptly get trashed by her Level 50 Alakazam, who is much higher-leveled than Erika's or Koga's signature Pokémon (and is only slightly lower than Blaine's).
