Linearity

Was anyone else bothered by you not being able to skip Brawly in ORAS? It's not like he was a challenge with those lowered levels (which is another post entirely :P), and I never even had too much trouble with him in RSE, I just hate that they removed the small chance you had to deviate from the order of the Gyms. In RSE you could battle every other Leader and then go back to him, and while that wasn't much, it was something. You were able to give Steven his letter and then head off instantly to keep exploring. One of the things I constantly see GSC getting knocked for, and HGSS because they didn't fix it, is the level scaling towards the middle/end of your Johto adventure. The Trainers and wild Pokemon after Morty are all around the same level, and then you make it to Clair and the E4 and you're generally under-leveled. People complain about it, but few people seem to know why it's like that, or at least they don't talk about it.

It's because of how much Johto opens up after Morty! Yes, you'll eventually have to stop Team Rocket again, but you can battle Chuck, Jasmine, and Pryce in any order! You could go east and then south from there, or west after getting Morty's Badge and Surf from the girls. You were free to explore and do what you wanted for that portion of the game, in the order you wanted to do it. When was the last time a Pokemon game let you do that? Kanto is constantly getting knocked too, because it's "boring" and "small", but Kanto was even more open than Johto! After you get Cut, you can skip Surge and go right to Lavender Town, from there you could head to Celadon, skip Erika, clear out Team Rocket's hideout and then head back to Lavender after getting a drink for the guard. With the Silph Scope in hand you can clear out Pokemon Tower, which frees up Silph Co. You can clear Silph Co, which frees up Sabrina, or since you got the Poke Flute at Pokemon Tower you could just forget about Silph and head straight to Fuchsia City. In Fuchsia you could beat Koga and get Surf from the Safari Zone, allowing you to go to Cinnabar, where you could go to Pokemon Mansion and get the key for Blaine's Gym. You could battle the 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th Gym Leaders in any order. Or you could battle the 5th and then the 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 7th in any order.

You'd obviously be under-leveled, but you could deviate from the path! Correct me if I'm wrong, but RSE were the last games were you could slightly fiddle with the order, and ORAS ruined that by forcing Brawly's Gym on you. It's bad enough Pokemon is continuing to roll with this whole "you're the chosen Trainer" thing, and the villainous teams having a fetish for trying to literally make a new/reshape the world, the least they could do is open the world up and let us do some things out of order. With that being said, let's talk linearity, what are your thoughts?

I did notice that and also the fact that instead of having to actually go through the entire cave and needing flash, they put Steven right near the entrace and force you to do the gym. To me its like GF is playing the Shadow Triad from BW and basicly herd you to the next point of intrest they think you want to see. Alot of the game pre-fly, you get the option for an NPC to load you up on their back and cart you where you need to be. That takes away from the adventure for me as much as being on a liniar path. In that respect, I think the old games really stand out for the fact that at a point you choose the order you want to do things. I can't help but wonder if this option to deviate from the planned path will be removed from other remakes of gen 1 and 2 to make the games easier.

Unfortunately, Pokemon has always been a linear game and has always meant to be, with the possible exception of Johto.
The nonlinearity in the Gen I games is the result of primarily one thing: People have managed to do sequence breaking. Everything in Kanto, with the exception of Saffron and Fuchsia gyms, was all meant to be done in a specific order. Thanks to the GB's limited engine, people have found ways around that order through one way or another.
Gen II is arguably the least linear, as you pretty much have the freedom to go where you want to because you get Surf at Ecruteak City and you are able to navigate to either side of the map from there, though the game does guide you to take on Cianwood and Olivine City next before taking on the other two gyms. What I didn't like about this is all four of those gyms are on the same "road" sorta thing, which makes the area in general feel rushed and railroaded in a sense (to clarify, I don't consider railroading to just being forced to one destination, but also to being forced down a narrow path to multiple destinations).

Stormerbuzz35 said:

Alot of the game pre-fly, you get the option for an NPC to load you up on their back and cart you where you need to be. That takes away from the adventure for me as much as being on a liniar path. In that respect, I think the old games really stand out for the fact that at a point you choose the order you want to do things. I can't help but wonder if this option to deviate from the planned path will be removed from other remakes of gen 1 and 2 to make the games easier.

Click to expand...

And providing you with the option to immediately warp to your next objective, which is far away and you have no access to Fly until later on, is a bad thing? You know, you don't have to take it. The one with Wally, however, can go die in a hole because you are forced to do that.

Orithan said:

And providing you with the option to immediately warp to your next objective, which is far away and you have no access to Fly until later on, is a bad thing? You know, you don't have to take it. The one with Wally, however, can go die in a hole because you are forced to do that.

Click to expand...

Agreed with that Wally one, but his character improved since RSE so I can forgive him for picking the player up like a mute cardboard cutout and carrying him. I honestly never thought of the distances as being far. I had the mach bike and more than enough repels due to not needing healing items. Maybe I'm being nitpicky about this, but actualy going the distance makes the game feel like I did more during the story. Even if that doing more is biking between towns cause I really don't feel like wasting a party slot on a Fly-Slave just yet.

The first two gens were made with people in mind who like to explore, while in gen 3 onwards the target group changed to people who like to play (j)RPGs. (J)RPGs are linear per design which is why the Pokemon games became more linear, too.

Then there's the ongoing casualisation that's been going on for a couple of years now. But that's a problem every franchise has, as apparently game developing companies think they would get more players by making everything easier.

R.F. said:

The first two gens were made with people in mind who like to explore, while in gen 3 onwards the target group changed to people who like to play (j)RPGs. (J)RPGs are linear per design which is why the Pokemon games became more linear, too.

Then there's the ongoing casualisation that's been going on for a couple of years now. But that's a problem every franchise has, as apparently game developing companies think they would get more players by making everything easier.

Click to expand...

Except Pokemon has never actually gotten easier, with the exception of Gen VI with the new EXP mechanics (FYI, I am not even talking about the EXP share here). Even if they did, they have a very good reason for it. The target demographic has been changing due to demands placed on them by other influences (particularly homework, which gets downright insane in later years of High School) - Not everyone has the time to sit down and spend a lot of time playing hard games.
So yes, devs do get more people into games by making everything easier. But, as I said before, Pokemon hasn't really been hard outside of unfair scenarios (eg. Koga and Sabrina's aces being Level 50 in Yellow, stupid amount of grinding in Johto, etc.) or B/W2 Challenge mode.

As for the non-linearity side of things, I think I explained my stance on it on my previous post.
For exploration, it is perfectly possible to have a lot of exploration with linearity. Super Metroid is linear as heck when it comes down to it, as you are required to do all of the mandatory things in a fixed order, but it is chock full of exploration. The key is giving the player lots of stuff to do and secrets to find on the side. In this sense; all of the first four generations did this reasonably well (for Pokemon standards, anyway), with Johto being the weakest and Hoenn being the strongest in that regard.

Orithan said:

The nonlinearity in the Gen I games is the result of primarily one thing: People have managed to do sequence breaking. Everything in Kanto, with the exception of Saffron and Fuchsia gyms, was all meant to be done in a specific order. Thanks to the GB's limited engine, people have found ways around that order through one way or another.

Click to expand...

I don't doubt that there was an intended order. I mean, that's why the Gym Leaders are ordered the way they are on the Trainer Card, but the order can be broken without even trying. Skipping Brock with the save skip is a sequence break, skipping Team Rocket's hideout and just using a Poke Doll instead of the Silph Scope is a sequence break, but no glitches or exploits are necessary to do the Gyms out of order the way I said. It's simply how you choose to do them/explore. Maybe the non-linearity really wasn't intended at all, but it's there, and it's awesome, and we need more of it.

Orithan said:

As for the non-linearity side of things, I think I explained my stance on it on my previous post.
For exploration, it is perfectly possible to have a lot of exploration with linearity. Super Metroid is linear as heck when it comes down to it, as you are required to do all of the mandatory things in a fixed order, but it is chock full of exploration. The key is giving the player lots of stuff to do and secrets to find on the side. In this sense; all of the first four generations did this reasonably well (for Pokemon standards, anyway), with Johto being the weakest and Hoenn being the strongest in that regard.

Click to expand...

Since when is Johto the weakest when it comes to exploration? Small as it is, Johto has at least three completely optional areas: Whirl Islands (which is quite large), Mt. Mortar (also large) and Dark Cave. You can probably count the Ruins of Alph, too, as you don't have to visit them at any point in the game. Union Cave and Lake of Rage have optional areas, too. There's this illusion that Hoenn has a lot to explore because of Dive, but in reality you'll find out that, despite being much bigger than Johto, Hoenn doesn't have many more optional areas.

Kanto and Johto are great at one point: they come full circle eventually. In Hoenn and subsequent regions your starting city is locked in all sides but the direction you have to take, and the game is a road from start to finish. In Kanto and Johto, however, the starting cities are connected to the rest of the region in at least two directions, and the path you do in your quest resembles a circle in which you go back to your home town eventually. It reflects a change in game design because backtracking became a thing of the devil in recent years. Hoenn and Sinnoh are still not so linear, but definitely more linear than Kanto and Johto.

As soon as I saw the title of this thread, I was prepared to see yet another massive round of BW being slammed for it. Guess not.

Anyway, while the regions that have so many areas are nice, i'm not opposed to the regions that are linear, partly because I feel like when they're not, I usually end up going the same way a lot of the time. And Unova and Kalos did have some areas that branched out too (like the Desert Resort and Route 16 from Nimbasa City, and Route 16 and 15 on the way to Dendemille Town), even if not as many.

I can't fully say how everyone else might be feeling on this, but I'm going to speak only for myself here, haha.

I'm a fan of this linearity way of things that a majority of Pokémon games seem to have. A reason behind my likeness towards it is because, well, it does help keeping ourselves from being confused and whatnot; when it comes to telling what we should do next and what we should not, this makes things slightly more worry-free.

Though, I will admit that for some of us--including myself at times--it's not impossible to lose track of where are in certain title after not playing it for a while, but if we imagine, same could apply to games that don't promote linearity; this is a drawback on both sides, and not just one.

Cerberus87 said:

Since when is Johto the weakest when it comes to exploration? Small as it is, Johto has at least three completely optional areas: Whirl Islands (which is quite large), Mt. Mortar (also large) and Dark Cave. You can probably count the Ruins of Alph, too, as you don't have to visit them at any point in the game. Union Cave and Lake of Rage have optional areas, too. There's this illusion that Hoenn has a lot to explore because of Dive, but in reality you'll find out that, despite being much bigger than Johto, Hoenn doesn't have many more optional areas.

Kanto and Johto are great at one point: they come full circle eventually. In Hoenn and subsequent regions your starting city is locked in all sides but the direction you have to take, and the game is a road from start to finish. In Kanto and Johto, however, the starting cities are connected to the rest of the region in at least two directions, and the path you do in your quest resembles a circle in which you go back to your home town eventually. It reflects a change in game design because backtracking became a thing of the devil in recent years. Hoenn and Sinnoh are still not so linear, but definitely more linear than Kanto and Johto.

Click to expand...

I'm going to have to admit that Hoenn is pretty weak when it comes to exploration. The only real places to explore are the underwater caves, Shoal Cave, and some of the places that you're not really forced to go to. Hoenn really has its appeal to me because it's a pretty gigantic region and you go to a bunch of different places that all look different and feel different. Emerald also has some nice postgame content in the Battle Frontier.

Brawly is interesting because to me, if you don't catch an Abra or Taillow, he's always a difficult Gym leader to me in RSE. In fact, he's probably the only Gym leader I've ever really had trouble with (the others seem to be in Hoenn too). I really liked that I could just go on and come back later, because he's just a pain in the butt if you're not overleveled.

Perhaps GF is trying to make the games a bit more like the anime. Ash never really skips a Gym, he just trains until he can beat them. And, like mentioned, there's more casual gamers than ever right now, and no casual gamer is going to want to grind or sit in the same spot for a long time trying to beat something. They're just going to give up and play something else.

Peitharchia said:

I can't fully say how everyone else might be feeling on this, but I'm going to speak only for myself here, haha.

I'm a fan of this linearity way of things that a majority of Pokémon games seem to have. A reason behind my likeness towards it is because, well, it does help keeping ourselves from being confused and whatnot; when it comes to telling what we should do next and what we should not, this makes things slightly more worry-free.

Though, I will admit that for some of us--including myself at times--it's not impossible to lose track of where are in certain title after not playing it for a while, but if we imagine, same could apply to games that don't promote linearity; this is a drawback on both sides, and not just one.

Click to expand...

My OCD makes me not like non-linear games. I insist on getting every item and side quest there is, which can frustrate me when it comes to hard-to-reach secrets.

Non-linear sidequests and a linear story is what works best, in my opinion. The game is by nature, pretty nonlinear anyway; Catch, grind and evolve your Pokemon and feel free to do what you want. There's so much freedom in Pokemon, but to have a cohesive storyline to drive the adventure forward is still a must-have. The balance is perfect; You're not restricted to play in a linear way, but WHEN you do, you'll get rewarded (More Pokemon, items and new places to explore). For example, you can skip the "Kenya bird quest" and the fighting Dojo, but then you won't get the reward for completing the task. You can avoid half of the trainers in the game, but then you won't get any cash or xp. And for me that's an important aspect; You're always getting rewarded for doing stuff. Always.