Denis Sinner, Creator of Monster Sanctuary, joins us to discuss his recently released monster taming meets metroidvania title.
What was most interesting about our conversation though was how mainstream monster taming games like Pokemon have sacrificed strategy, challenge and innovation, for simplicity and to make their games as accessible as possible to a young audience.
If a game is too easy, can it truly be fun?
Where's the lie though
Even GameFreak have gotten a point where they don't seem able to make big Pokemon games without them sacrificing a shit load of features that came below. They just think adding a new silly gimmick will bring people in.
What I've started doing for challenge in pokemon games is constantly swapping my pokemon out. In early games you had to choose and build up your team, but Pokemon games now make that too easy and OP. Swapping out your pokemon gives you a challenge and helps you fill in your pokedex.
Still, wish there was a hard mode.
S&S isn't balanced out well enough. I've played plenty of JRPGs and most feature a shared EXP system so that unused characters don't become complete useless later on, but this just doesn't work well in Pokemon. I stopped playing after Fire Red and with those games I always found myself sticking with my starter for everything. In Shield I had the same problem cept I rarely bothered switching my team and went on to beat the game basically just using Inteleon.
Then there's three different EXP candies on top of rare candies on top of jobs ontop the excessive amount of exp you can already get from wild battles. There's no to battle at all. There's no need to even breed cause you can get perfect stat pokemon in raids and just use a mint. I guess this helps get to the online competitive modes much quicker but I just can't get into Pokemons boring turn based battles, and it's impossible to play in co-op battles with friends with the awful link code matchmaking and lack of messaging on Switch
I don't mind these other monster collector games becoming what pokemon can't. It actually gives other monster collector games a way to stand out apart from Pokémon. Pokémon for me personally is a perfect experience that us older fans needs to realize will never be what we want because the game is for kids and they make this clear ever iteration. So instead of complaining about something we literally can't change lets put that desire for something more into these indy games like temtem and others.
I'd settle for being able to skip the cutscenes. They're miserable.