Pokémon Sword & Pokémon Shield and the split of a fandom.
What happened?
On June 11, shortly after Nintendo Direct E3 2019 presentation, the TreeHouse gameplay featuring Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield took place. The event was attended by the director of the games Shigeru Ohmori and the producer Junichi Masuda.
After demonstrating one of the new features of the games, the Wild Area, Masuda dropped the bomb that turned the Pokémon community upside down. Right before the end of the segment, Masuda said that only pokémon found in the Galar region can be transferred via Pokémon Home to the games, leaving out all the other monsters. At the time two justifications were presented: the animations are more refined due to the hardware change and that this would be necessary due to the balance of the game.
It was enough for the hashtag #bringbackthenationaldex and variants viralize in any post of the Pokémon profiles or even Pokémon related Nintendo posts in social media. In addition, by the time of the writing of this article, the YouTube video of the TreeHouse segment already accumulated 64 thousand dislikes against 18 thousand likes.
Much has already been discussed on the internet and the fandom has, so to speak, been divided by those who advocate for the return of the National Dex and those who do not find their absence a big of a deal. What I am going to do in this article, with my own opinions and considerations, is to combat the misinformation that has taken place of the discussions and try to reason some of the more radical statements coming from both sides of this war.
Important concepts
Before entring the debate itself, it’s important to know what exactly are the Pokémon Bank and the Pokémon Home, essential services to comprehend the established controversy.
The Pokémon Bank is an application released for the Nintendo 3DS during the sixth generation of Pokémon (Pokémon XY and Pokémon OmegaRuby & AlphaSapphire) to store your monsters in the cloud to be used in future games for an annual fee of $ 4.99 dollars. It has never been clear, however, how far this service would extend: if it’s only attached to the 3DS or if a version of it would be released upon the arrival of the Eighth Generation.
The Pokémon Home was presented, among other announcements, at a press conference held on 05/28/2019. According to the presentation, the Pokémon Home would be an app available for the Nintendo Switch and mobile devices that will allow you to transfer the pokémon from the Pokémon Bank, Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee, Pokémon Go and Pokémon Sword and Shield. For the last ones it would be a both ways situation, since the Pokémon could be transferred from Home to those games.
And by the way, allow me to clarify a misunderstanding: despite speaking in National Dex, the hashtag wants all Pokémon available for use in Sword and Shield, and not a National Dex in the strict sense, as an instrument or device. Pokémon Sun & Moon and Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon do not have a National Dex in the menus, but they allow the use of all Pokémon. There is some confusion about this in the debates.
Official Justifications and Fan Reactions
The two justifications given by GameFreak, as said, were that the animations are more detailed and need more time and that this was necessary for balancing the game. I will tackle this issue from the perspective of extreme arguments found on both sides of this clash.
I make Pokemon animation in 5min X GameFreak is a small studio and it is impossible for them to make all this
I first put as an example two arguments easily found on the Internet that represent the radicalization of ideas. The first one even became a meme of people trying to create 3D models of pokémon in 5min with catastrophic results. We all know that you can not create 3D modeling in such a short time. The same goes to transfer an existing 3D model — such as the models of all old pokémons, recycled from Generation 6 — to another platform, which takes time and polishing so the model fits the pattern and the artistic direction of the new games. Yet, this work does not compare at all with the effort to create a model from scratch and entirely new animations, which is not the case. I repeat, all the 3D models and animations of the old pokémon seen so far in Sword & Shield are imported directly from Gen 6.
If the Eighth Generation was a completely disruptive game, having redone all the modeling and battle animations of the known pokémons, the justification would be perfectly understandable and acceptable. In fact, it has occurred to me before that with more and more monsters added in each generation, sometime cuts would have to be made. However, Gen 8 does not seem to be the right time to do this, given the recycling of the models already mentioned among other factors.
Many also argue, and they aren’t entirely wrong, that by “animation” Masuda didn’t want to talk only about the pokémon (although that was what it seemed) but about the whole game including the characters, scenarios, etc. In this case I try to refute the second argument that GameFreak is a small studio. The GF may be a small developer compared to others but Pokémon is a billion dollar franchise, one of the most profitable, if not the most profitable today. If there was no shortage of money, they lacked planning to execute something whose absence they knew would displease so many fans.
Everyone will be affected by this X Only hardcore players will be affected by this
No. Not everyone will be affected by it. There are several ways to play Pokémon and there is no right way to do it, although there are some classic, but not mandatory, tasks to do (Gotta catch’em all?). Many people do not have pokémon to transfer, have no interest in transferring them in the future, they are happy to complete the regional Dex or do not want to make this even an objective. So in fact not everyone will be affected, although there is a factor of empathy that I will speak about later.
In contrast, it’s wrong to think that only those people, like me, who have the complete Dex in the Pokémon Bank, will feel the weight of that decision. The so-called “casual” players of Pokémon Let’s Go and Pokémon Go, both games that also aim to attract their players to the main games of the franchise, will be affected. There is no guarantee that the Kanto + Alola Forms + Meltan and Melmetal pokémon will be in Galar, so someone who played these games may have a favorite Pokémon that cannot be transferred to SWSH, as soon as they people realize that there is a transfer system. In the same way we have the case of Pokémon Go, which already offers monsters from the Sinnoh region (Gen 4) and must surely will reach the fauna of the Unova region by the time of the launch of Gen 8. How many Pokémon Go players who bought the Switch to play SWSH will not be able to transfer some of their favorite pokémon? Whoever thinks that the only ones affected will be the ones with a stuffed Bank is wrong.
The game is crap X the game is wonderful
I think it’s very easy to realize that this is the easiest radicalism to override. We don’t know the game, so no one can have an opinion about their quality. What you can talk about is what you have seen so far and everyone has their own opinion based on what they’ve seen. The game seems very nice, but this has nothing to do with the Dex discussion, nor does it depend on the definitive solution of the case (with Dex complete good and the opposite bad). They are independent things.
I’ll cancel my preorder X You’re complaining, but you’ll buy the game anyway
As a consumer of a product, you can buy it and still complain about its flaws— expressing your dissatisfaction can be even a hope that a new version of the product doesn’t have those flaws (or at least what you didn’t like). You can even decide not to buy the product if that flaw or that feature that did not please you is decisive for your purchase. I think there is a certain amount of unnecessary drama from some people in saying they are canceling pre-purchase, but if this comes from a genuine place, that decision must be respected — no one is forced to buy anything. In the same way, as I have already said, one thing does not exclude the other: you can express dissatisfaction and remain interested in the game by what has been presented so far.
Nothing that GF does is good/ threatens developers X I defend until death everything they do
Radicality, unfortunately, is inherent of any fandom, and Pokémon is no different. On one hand those people who have been fans for so long are whining about there’s nothing good in the franchise so far. As I said before, it is possible to buy something and disagree with certain characteristics of the product. But it’s hard to believe that year after year, game after game and purchase after purchase you come right now and say that nothing is good and you have “wasted” your money so many times nonetheless. More indefensible is the toxicity promoted by a noisy minority that goes beyond the limits of polite and argumentative expression to offend people in their personal profiles (believe it or not, developers are still people). From another angle, there are those who feel zero empathy for the lack of a feature that is not a nickpicking desire of a few — judging by the dislikes and the noise generated by it. It is as they say: “if it does not affect me then it is not important”. It doesn’t matter that so many people had the legitimate expectation of bringing their favorite pokémon they transfer game to game all the way here. But unfortunately expect empathy these days is dream too much, eh?
Postpone the game X In the next games they add the rest / This has happened before
Postponing a game from a franchise like Pokémon was never an option. The train of a new generation carries with it wagons and wagons of diverse things: anime, films, TCG, merchandise, etc. Pokémon games, especially those that start a new generation, follow a strict schedule on which an entire arsenal of other products depends. Even if this was a possibility, the Pokémon Company would hardly postpone the game by the cry of an absent feature, althouth important to many. As for the argument of adding National Dex in other games, nothing is known about it so far. It is speculated that from now on the absence of all the monsters is the new rule and perhaps this is the last real chance to show displeasure with the new directions of the games. Also, that argument that everything is solved in expansion games and remakes it’s nothing but to conform to an incomplete initial product, which should never become the norm.
As for the argument that this has already happened, it’s really true. The Ruby & Sapphire (Gen 3) games on GameBoy Advance did not allow the transfer of pokémon of the first two generations. And, imagine, Hoenn ‘s Dex didn’t contain Ditto — crucial monster to breeding activity. But acknowledging that this happened before does not invalidate the unsatisfaction, since it’s not because it happened before it must necessarily occur again. From Gen 4 (Diamond & Pearl) onwards it is possible, through various tools over time, to transfer Pokemon to new games. This doesn’t create certainty of the future, but it certainly creates an expectation, especially when there is a paid service like the Pokémon Bank in question.
And here is a curiosity. The Glameow evolutionary line (Glameow and Purugly) has never been in a regional Dex since its appearance in Gen 4. This makes me think about what kind of selection they want to make in each new game and about the concept of favorite Pokémon. Favorite for whom? I’m sure many fans have favorites that do not exactly fit into the favorites that the Pokémon Company decides, giving them protagonism.
Game Balancing and Metagame
This is an area that I definitely do not master. What I can say is that balancing pokémon in the single player campaing is very simple: you can maintain a specific regional dex and only allows the transfer of other pokémon in the post game. Done. I don’t think anyone desires non-native pokémon to be available day one, which is rather impossible since the Pokémon Home will only be released in early 2020, a few months after the release of SWSH. At this point, to be realistic, what can be expected is post-launch patches that allow the inclusion of the remaining Pokémon.
As far as Metagame is concerned, the Pokémon Company in official competitions — as well as other competitions — has always used the banning system to prevent the use of too powerful or too unbalanced pokémon, so at this moment I still can’t buy any plausible argument in the sense that a constrained Dex would directly beneficiate the competitive scene.
My final thoughts
Well, if it has not been clear by now, I’m in favor of bringing the National Dex back and in favor of the demonstration of dissatisfaction — by arguments rather than offenses — by the fans. I was one of the people who defended the games at the time of the revelation against the expectations that it would be the “Breath of the Wild of Pokémon”. One way or another, Pokémon has always managed to evolve generation after generation, not only by adding new monsters — if the graphic leap from Gen 5 to Gen 6 is not evolution I don’t know what it is — but also in the attempt to bring and try new things. It’s true that in recent times the addition of new elements without a clear plan for them has been problematic, since both Mega Evolutions and Z-Moves, for example, have been removed from SWSH. Mega Evolutions changed the design of some “favorite” pokémon and now it seems that this effort will end up in the trash, despite the passion of the fans for this feature.
Speaking of plans, there is a lack of transparency to the fandom regarding the services (Pokémon Bank, which is paid) and in relation to what they intend to do with Pokémon from now on (or what we can expect from Pokémon from here on out). I believe that if these messages had been clear from the beginning, none of what we are seeing now would’ve happened. Imagine, for example, if they hadn’t presented the Pokémon Home and created that expectation of bring back all of the pokémon. I personally would still be hoping to use my pokémon from Bank but with the feeling that this might not happen because it’s a new generation on a new hardware. The lack of timing for things and the feeling of uncertainty were just the amount of fuel needed for the explosion that is occurring right now.
I have no doubt that the Switch can handle even more than all existing pokémon. The issue has never been about the console’s power but rather, according to developers, mostly time and work management. I very much believe that post-release game support through patches adding the missing pokémon — maybe even through Max Raid Battles — would solve the problem and make people not only happy but also engaging in the game for more time. However, there may be another motivation of the Pokémon Company behind all this: expansion/continuation/remake games that bring the other Pokémon (and then through SWSH update the trade between the games would be allowed) and supposedly stimulate you to buy those games. Supposedly because I think this is by no means a crucial factor in the sale of these eventual subsequent games. Pokémon sells, for better or for worse, anyhow.
And in this reasoning I say: Pokémon Sword & Pokémon Shield will sell a lot and, combined, have the potential to reach the top of the best-selling Switch games since its release. It’s not the lack of a National Dex that will make the games sell less. But perhaps GameFreak, The Pokémon Company and Nintendo should open their eyes to the requests of the fans since, from disappointment to disappointment, less plush dolls are sold, people might not buy that much TCG anymore, despite the child appeal of the anime it loses relevance etc. And maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but at a certain moment … We do not want to catch’em all anymore.
