General chat: Who needs mspaf anyway

the next game should be paced so that you get the pokedex and your first pokemon about ten hours in

The pacing was well done in this game. Unlike in B/W* where every new area required a 5 minute cutscene with your stupid chatty friends, it didn't feel as unnecessary or clunky and it didn't feel as redundant every time they talked like it did in B/W.

Basically yeah, I definately enjoyed the pacing in this game. I had fun the whole way through as opposed to just going through the motions until I got to the meat of the game (Except for waiting to get to the rest of lumiose city, I was impatient as all hell to explore the whole thing). The only reason I'd want the game to be shorter is if the storyline itself is chunkier like B/W, in which case every conversation needs to get to the point quicker. Lot waffling done in B/W.

*I'm using B/W as a comparison here because of how big of a change the storyline was to the rest of the series, in that it wasn't just an excuse plot.

uh, i found the X/Y dialogue way more redundant and awkward than any of the other main-series games i've played...

i don't enjoy the massive lull between thefirst and second gyms in the slightest.

Yeah, I felt the exact opposite, tinning. XY had the stupid chatty friends who were really just there to distract you from the main plot and add a bit of padding. Basically everything they dragged me off to do felt like a huge waste of time (especially that pathetic excuse for a haunted house). Meanwhile, BW was able to give all of the characters actual character development and a real sense of depth; you can't tell me Tierno and Shauna were anything other than one-dimensional. We also got to see the Gym Leaders and their personalities a bit more prominently, as well as getting to see that they are important figures in their communities; again, not so much in XY.

As for the pacing, I think it was really awkward for it to take so long to reach the second gym and then have the remaining gyms be so close to each other. Some sort of happy medium, where there's still some time between them but it doesn't take forever and a day to reach the next one, would have been much better.

i wouldn't mind it so much if it wasn't RIGHT at the beginning of the game, or if the other gyms had big breaks between them...but having only that one odd-feeling gap kills my enthusiasm for just restarting a ton of times.

I actually liked Shauna and Tierney, though, their dialogue while not concerning the plot in any way was less boring to me than the boring rival cheran and... well okay, Bianca was alright, but only till nimbasa city when her character development ended with her father issues. And though the gap between gyms was massive, there was a lot of stuff going on in between. A quarter of lumiose city to explore, a berry farm, daycare, the battle chateau, A HUGE variety of pokemon to capture and train, as well as other things. This is probably just personal opinion, though. I tried to replay them by playing black to get mons i'd missed, i made it to the third town because of how boring it was, I doubt I'd have that problem with X. Was a lot happening in X/Y? No, but I was patient with it, and thought it was good. It's pokemon, the plot is always going to be kinda generic, so may as well make the other bits more fun, which they were.

I can't speak about B2/W2 of course, from what i've heard they were good, and there's always the possibility they would make me think differently.

the number of pokemon available really is staggering. i bet you could do a lot of nuzlockes and have a different experience every time. i mean, a lot of nuzlocking is having a different experience than the main game, but you get what i mean.

Outside of the pacing, though, it really bothered me how a bunch of the Pokemon available were second or third stage so that if you wanted to complete your dex you had to do this huge daycare shuffle repeatedly instead of just being able to level everything up to evolve.

I'll have more to add to this discussion once I beat the game (which, after 7 hours on a bus ride to and from San Francisco, I am much much closer to doing (I even beat the bad guys and got the box legendary!)), but right now it looks like XY is just about on par with BW as far as interesting rivals, and I actually think I might prefer Team Flare to Team Plasma, if only because Gen V did an awful job of discussing the whole oppressed Pokemon thing and waved it off when it turned out the leader had a secret agenda all along. (Much like my opinion on the first season of Avatar: Legend of Korra, heh.) For pacing, I'm with NN, it was pretty weird and disorganized.

don't beat the game yet

i haven't found a shiny wartortle in your friend safari yet and when you beat the game it'll update and that makes it that much less likely to find a wartortle, regardless of shiny status

just kidding, i'm IV breeding for a perfect rain dish squirtle right now. once i do that i'm going to breed with this random german squirtle that i got through wonder trade

by the way does anyone want a 2-3 perfect IV squirtle that may or may not have rain dish? the IVs would be something like atk/def/spdef/spd. i'm currently in the process of breeding a female rain dish squirtle with 31 in hp/def/spdef/spd, then i'm going to move on to spatk and not worry about actual attack IVs because it's modest.

i don't even think this thing will be competitively viable but blastoise is my all time favorite starter so nyah~

I'd say yes but if I had a Blastoise I would want to run it as my Mega, and as a mega it fills the exact same role as Clawitzer and I already have a badass shiny Clawitzer named Eridan.

Blastoise is a fantastic spinner, even without mega.
...that said, i use starmie, so someone else can take the thing if they want it.

Well, I don't think non-mega is a FANTASTIC spinner. It's alright. Better now that it gets Dark Pulse. But MBlasty really is great as a spinner. Clawitzer's great and all, cool signature ability, design , name etc, but arguably it does not fill MBlastoise's roll. MBlastoise however fills Clawitzer's and adds spinning and a lot of bulk. I'd use it myself except for the single mega rule.

Mind you I'd use most of the better megas but for the rule. They're all (mostly) so different! Aerilate! Electric Dragon! Fire Dragon! Auto-drought sweeper! Huge Power tank! I don't mind though. OP etc etc.

So now that the metagame's had some time to stabilize and we've had time to try everything out, which Megas do y'all feel are worse than their regular forms in battle?

gengar and kangaskhan because whatever smogon says is wrong and theyve banned both so they must be the worst of the bunch
sorry oj for nintendo giving you such a bad megaevolution

Hmm. The only one I can think of that's probably worse than its standard form in a few respects is mega heracross, who fills a really damn weird niche that cloyster and cinccino already had.

...also none of you commented on my new avatar.
You bastards.

its not barbaracle it cant be your avatar

I didn't notice your avatar! But now that I have, I can't get this out of my head.

I noticed but didn't have anything to say since I don't know what it is and if I asked people about their avatars every time I didn't know what they were I'd get bored and end this sentence premat

Arguably Alakazam; it's the same niche it had in gen 4 but allowing for power creep. Sure it's fast but it shares the same problems as regular zam without the awesomeness of a guaranteed focus sash (unk) or crazy life orb boosts. Scizor and Tyranitar are both fine Pokes but items make a set and they only have so many viable sets before they're outclassed by their regular forms. Heracross is useable, just not worth the slot. Manectric is meh and Houndoom is terrible but both are better than their regular forms. Similar for Banette. Awesome design but horrible horrible stats.

There's really not enough megas to justify a whole debate on this :/ Bar Alakazam, Ttar and Scizor I think all the megas are BETTER, but not necessarily good.

I don't see why anyone would put a mega stone on Heracross over Scarf/Band. My non-IV-bred, EV trained Jolly Heracross wrecks a LOT of stuff with scarf. Or, did in gen 5.

speaking of new avatars

iT i don't know what yours is
and i want to hope that someone knows where my new avatar is from but I doubt it so I will post it in a spoiler so people can guess. i'll give you a hint (though admittedly not much of one): this character is from a JRPG.

SPOILER:

now i'm guessing that probably all of you are going to either click the spoiler or not care enough to bother finding out.



on other fronts, i'm starting to get 4IV squirtles with consistency. Most, if not all of them, comprise of HP/def/spdef/one other stat. I got my first 5 IV squirtle. It's a male with HP/atk/spatk/spdef/spd. I wish it was def instead of atk; I'm working on a bulky spatk-er.

Hanky Panky wrote:now i'm guessing that probably all of you are going to either click the spoiler or not care enough to bother finding out.

i clicked the spoiler but i didnt care so much that ive already forgotten in like ten seconds what the answer was

congratulations, kotakun. you are the middle of that particular venn diagram.

See, drega knows whats up guys
We should all aspire to be just a little bit more like drega
It's shi-long lang from ace attorney investigations, one of the finest damn characters in any game i've ever played.

clearly you haven't played anything from the Tales series.

invisibleTerrarium wrote:See, drega knows whats up guys
We should all aspire to be just a little bit more like drega
It's shi-long lang from ace attorney investigations, one of the finest damn characters in any game i've ever played.

i'll bet all you uncultured swines will NEVER figure out what MY avatar is from