4th Gen Ball Capsule and Seals

All the Gen 4 games have this unique feature, where you can use up to 8 special effect Seals in each 12 of Ball Capsules, and when you put the capsule into your Pokeball, you could summon your Pokemon with style, from bubbles, fire, thunders, you name it! What's your opinion on this feature?

Here are my problems with seals:

1. You cannot deposit your pokemon into the PC if they have seals. Having to constantly put them off-and-on was too big of an inconvenience.

2. The art was inconsistent with itself. Whereas some effects were sprites/pixelly, others, like the fire, flowers, and musical notes, were gradients or antialiased. They didn't go well together with the sprite feel of the game.

3. Not enough options. We have yellow and green lightning, but no blue lightning. Seriously, green lightning, but no blue?!

4. Seals appear from top-to-down. You can't control the order, or if they appear behind the pokemon.

5. They spelled "seel" wrong durr.

6. In HGSS, you only get 3 random seals as an inconvenient daily. Not worth the effort

My biggest problem... they gave up. They didn't integrate them into the new games, and tried to improve their flaws. No, they just gave up with seals completely. Even Battle Revolution, which debuted in the same generation as seals and would have looked amazing to see alongside 3D effects... didn't have seals. :( Alas, they failed to become a memorable option in the games.

I liked it. It was very fun to customize your capsules and watch your Pokémon come out in a flashy way. It would've been better if they allowed you to make your own seals, though, so that your capsule designs were completely different from other people. Either that, or they could've allowed us to download more seals from the net (just like how we download event Pokémon). The only thing that I didn't like about this feature is that once one of your Pokémon was holding seals, you weren't able to put it in the PC again unless you took these seals away from it. D:

I liked the concept of the seals, although the problem is that most aren't obtained until you get to Sunyshore City, and again the only ones you can get before there are the alphabet ones by catching Unown in the Solaceon Ruins. Another downside was having to remove the seals before you could stick the Pokemon back in the PC, but I did love having the fancy effects when my Pokemon got sent out.

I liked the idea of seals, I found it to be really creative and nice ingame. (Torterra is even more epic with Random letter around him, RIGHT?!)

I only had one major problem with it, and it was the fact you could't put the Pokemon in the PC if they had a capsule, which pretty much ruled out any chances of me putting capsules on my secondary Pokemon (Torterra rarely got into the PC, so he always had a capsule).

I absolutely adored the concept of seals and when they worked they were a heck of a lot of fun - definitely one of my favourites features of any game. The problems, as many people have said already, were that you had to take the seals off before using the Pokémon with the PC and that seals were a real pain to get hold of. I would've much preferred for seals to stay on the Pokémon until you choose to remove them and for them to be accessible all throughout the game, perhaps as vending machines in every mart or something where the stock changes daily, and above all else I'm disappointed that they gave up on them for future generations. I really do hope they make a comeback for Gen VI, but it seems unlikely.

I liked Seals a lot - particularly the Fire ones, and the petals, which I think were done really well - having Roserade come out in a cloud of black petals looks bad-ass.
However, there were problems - not getting many until Sunnyshore City (Seriously, who uses the letters?) and having to remove them every time you box a pokémon being the main ones. Plus they didn't give you anywhere to buy them in HgSs, which was disappointing - even having them in the Battle Frontier would've been better than not at all.

Basically everything Shrew said. I loved these things but being unable to box Pokemon with seals was a huge put-off. They could have worked on it to make the feature so, so much better!

The concept of seals is alright, but it's just so inconvenient to use, especially since Pokemon in a sealed ball cannot be deposited.

I liked how we can have our Pokemon appear in battle with special and unique effects. To jazz up things a little, I put two or more seals of different effects on a single Pokeball and thus makes both activate and combine into an exciting display! Imagine a fiery burst of petals surrounded by lightning. That would be a sight to behold.

As so many others have already stated, if only Pokemon with seals could be deposited, it would make this feature so much more convenient and slightly less annoying. I don't understand why though. They're just stickers on a Pokeball. Why can't you deposit a Pokeball with stickers on it?? Sad they removed it in future generations. Hope they'll make a comeback in X&Y.

The seals where a neat addition, however I only experimented with it once. I wasn't really bothered to use it continuously in-game.

alienhunterx said:

I think it was a creative decision by the franchise so that Battle loving people could also taste some of the wonderful features mainly present in the contests. So I loved that feature

Click to expand...

I think the anime did a good job with seals, being a contest-thing, and just overall looking really good.

In the games, did seals activate during Super Contests? I cannot remember.

Besides the depositing issue, some of the seals were pretty cool. Most of them were kinda comicky, so I picked like the flare ones.

The best solution I can think of? Turn the capsule/seal combinations into "SFX Balls", which cost the same as the corresponding seal and show the same animations. An SFX Ball could be stored normally. it would have no capture modifiers, but improve happiness like a Luxury Ball. How does thls help Pokémon already caught in another ball type? One town (reachable after 6+ badges) might have a Detailing Shop which converted team members' Poké Balls into SFX Balls for a fee.

Seals were a really cool concept that they added, but it's a shame that they were still in a bit of a primitive stage before being completely dropped. Sure, they weren't perfect, but it finally gave us a chance to add some personality to our Pokemon (or their Poke Balls, at least), even if it was a bit of a hassle using them at times.

That being said, I understand why they got rid of the alphabet seals (considering the younger audience and how much easier it is to battle online now), but I wish they would've expanded on the shapes and colors of the remaining seals instead of sweeping them under the rug once the 5th gen games hit.

I like it, because it lets me to summon my Pokemon with style, the only issue I found was to control how the effect of the Seals applies when summoning Pokemon in battle though.

Shrew said:

In the games, did seals activate during Super Contests? I cannot remember.

Click to expand...

If I recall right (I'm still unsure), Seals don't apply when in Super Contests in the games. But still, seals feature gives us a glance of how we summon Pokemon in the games as in Super Contests in the anime.

I used Ball capsules on occasion, because of the really cool animations. I just wish though that they were as awesome in the games as they were in the anime.