Do you dislike the HM system?

Started by Oblox January 23rd, 2015 6:02 AM
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Age 41
Male
UK
Seen July 9th, 2021
Posted November 20th, 2019
750 posts
8.6 Years
Is it just me that dislikes the whole HM system? I hate having to give certain pokemon HM's during the main story and then not being able to get rid of them until I reach the move deleter, I also dislike having to keep HM's on pokemon or create an HM slave just to explore the world. Id much prefer it if once you reached whatever point in the story you were given a TM replacement for each ability so that you can add/remove at will or better still that once you'd earned the badge/TM version at the right point in the story you could just use the ability without even needing to learn it on any pokemon similar to how the eon flute works (since the animation for things such as fly doesnt even match whatever pokemon you have it on). It gives you no benefit to competitive battles, if you want the move learn it otherwise just use the ability outside of battle when playing the game.
Age 34
Male
UK
Seen April 30th, 2021
Posted January 26th, 2018
1,197 posts
17.9 Years
I've never understood them. We have TM's that have overworld effects, what does HM's accomplish other than been a pain to remove from your Pokemon, or requiring you to ditch having another real teammate in favor of an HM slave? I really hope GameFreak decided to ditch them in 7th Gen.

blue

gucci

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United Kingdom
Seen September 26th, 2021
Posted August 7th, 2019
21,056 posts
15.4 Years
They're alright, but the fact that for me there is only two useful field moves is sort of a let down. They should be forgettable at least, nothing worse than when a better move comes along and you're stuck with something like Rock Smash.

Sebastian_Sommer

Rocket grunt

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Hong Kong
Seen June 11th, 2017
Posted June 7th, 2017
312 posts
9.6 Years
I hate all of the HM except surf and waterfall since they take up a move slot in your pokemon and cannot be removed unless you waste a heart scale. This is why I like the flight mechanic of latio/latias since it is way better than the standard fly and I don't need to teach that worthless move onto my flying pokemon. My opinion of the HM might improve if they get enhanced in terms of power and effects.
Age 41
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UK
Seen July 9th, 2021
Posted November 20th, 2019
750 posts
8.6 Years
I hate all of the HM except surf and waterfall since they take up a move slot in your pokemon and cannot be removed unless you waste a heart scale. This is why I like the flight mechanic of latio/latias since it is way better than the standard fly and I don't need to teach that worthless move onto my flying pokemon. My opinion of the HM might improve if they get enhanced in terms of power and effects.
You dont need a heart scale to forget just to re-learn moves.

Sebastian_Sommer

Rocket grunt

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Hong Kong
Seen June 11th, 2017
Posted June 7th, 2017
312 posts
9.6 Years
You dont need a heart scale to forget just to re-learn moves.
Oh right, lol. I forgot about this cause every time I have my pokemon forget a move, I immediately have them relearn another one. Thanks for reminding me of this.

Hikamaru

Age 30
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Seen January 24th, 2019
Posted September 4th, 2018
50,214 posts
12.2 Years
I have to admit the HMs are still annoying after six generations because to fully explore you still need an HM slave, but I do like how Fly isn't needed as much thanks to the new soar mechanic with Latios/Latias.

7th Gen needs to change these mechanics to make them into an optional field move that doesn't take up a moveslot.
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Megan

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10.3 Years
My thoughts on HMs are:

In gen 1 they were usefull. With Pokemon having a lackluster movepool and TMs being single use you are more then willing to sacrifice a move slot with an HM move for more power (especially Surf and Strength). They basically added some more variety into movesets.
From gen 2 onward the whole HM mechanic went downhill, though. We get more Pokemon, we can use better moves like Return, that deal more damage, but we also get more HMs, with a lot of duplicates (like, do we really need three Water type HMs?). Sure we also get the move deleter, but we still had to carry them around for that one Waterfall in our way. Then again, TMs were still single use and movesets were still not as good as they could have been, so we were still inclined to teach our Pokemon an HM move for more power.

The real problem emerged when the amount of TMs got insanely high and TMs became reusable. While in the past you had to choose which Pokemon on your team got Return and which Strength, you are now able to give Return to all of them, rendering Strength basically useless outside of "Oh, I need to move those rocks"-moments. Also with over 700 Pokemon to choose from, having to have certain Pokemon on your team for certain HM moves feels more like a restriction, unlike gen 1 were there were only 150 with about 50% of them being Pokemon nobody really cares about anyway.

Or in a nutshell: HMs were a good thing in the past, but now powercreep and the likes made them more of a nuisance and GF definitely has to change that system in the future, or else it'll become even more annoying as the next gens pass.
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Pendraflare

Age 32
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Pennsylvania
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Posted March 29th, 2021
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9.8 Years
The real problem emerged when the amount of TMs got insanely high and TMs became reusable. While in the past you had to choose which Pokemon on your team got Return and which Strength, you are now able to give Return to all of them, rendering Strength basically useless outside of "Oh, I need to move those rocks"-moments. Also with over 700 Pokemon to choose from, having to have certain Pokemon on your team for certain HM moves feels more like a restriction, unlike gen 1 were there were only 150 with about 50% of them being Pokemon nobody really cares about anyway.
But to add on to this, for whatever it may be worth, in ORAS you don't get Return until a long way through the game, whereas in B2W2 and XY you got it pretty early (but both of those games didn't explicitly require Strength until Victory Road). Although if i'm not mistaken, the first point in ORAS that explicitly requires Strength is the Seafloor Cavern, which Pacifidlog Town is accessible not far off from.

Not that I like the HM system either, and it wasn't helped by Rock Smash becoming an HM again in ORAS.
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starseed galaxy auticorn

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Age 34
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18.9 Years
I agree with everything said here. It's always been such a pain in the ass. What's worse is how they FORCE you to use an HM on your pokemon just to pass an obstacle. The least they could do is make it so you could delete the HM after you are done with it. I agree it's annoying because not everyone wants to just have an HM slave do all the work. D:
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12.1 Years
I'm with the collective, the system is quite an annoyance.

Early on when they were some of the strongest moves in the games and TMs were single use there was some highlight to HMs but now that they are useless in battle and in the case of most even their out of battle functions have little use they lost their point and have become just a nuisance. Which makes it quite inconvenient that they're not forgettable until your reach one of the last three gym cities where the move deleter always is.

Using a slave doesn't make that any easier because now instead of wasting a move slot you're wasting a party slot, I in particular really dislike and find it difficult having to make room in my party for a slave even for a short distance because if I have to battle trainers while carrying it that's a team member missing training opportunities.

They've taken it one step in the right direction however by removing Flash as an HM, most useless move there is after Splash. I've not required it even for dark caves in literally years. Even in the original RBY when it was an entirely dark screen rather than a circle of light I learned to navigate without it.

Hopefully in future games they will continue to correct the flaws in the system.


Male
Seen October 9th, 2017
Posted July 13th, 2017
1,900 posts
9.6 Years
I'm actually surprised no one is actually questoning WHY the HM system is in place the way it is. There's a very specific, game breaking reason why they force you to not delete HMs and thats' because there are HM moves that can be learned by some pokemon via level up OR you can transfer pokemon who know certain HM moves:

so say you get to the point where you get the appropriate badge to use a move in the overworld map (let's take cut for example) you have a pokemon from an old game that knows Cut (and since people will fixate on Cut specifically, you can also subsitute ANY Hm for this same scenario) just for the heck of it, you start cutting away to get certain items, you level up, learn a better move and delete Cut and then oh look! You're late for school or work, you save and quit, come back later and start your game up again and oh no! Once you start your game up again all the trees have respawned and since you deleted Cut, you can't get past them because even though you got the badge, yo didn't go to Cutter's House first so now you can't teach anything in your party Cut (or whatever other HM move got you stuck somewhere) and no you need to reset your game and lose the 2, 20 or 200 hours you put into it for a simple mistake that can happen to anyone. THIS is the reason the HM system is in place. in the original Hoenn games if you were on Dewford and had a pokemon with Surf in your PC the game would prevent you from releasing that pokemon from your PC if it was the last one in your PC that knew Surf, even if you had the HM in your items pocket because if you lost all the pokemon that knew Surf in Dewford, you were trapped and could not get off. It's actually an extremely well thought out system.

The same thing happens when you encounter Latias/Latios and you have a full party. If you send the pokemon back to the PC that has Surf, you're now stuck in the other side of Hoenn until you get all the way up to the weather institute and get access to a PC again.

I would MUCH rather be inconvenience by having to find someone to delete the move than not pay attention briefly and lose a move that makes me have to completely restart my game all over from the beginning. For every 1 person complaining about having to delete the move, I can guarantee there would be 1000 complaining if such a game breaking system was allowed to be in the games because LOTS of people (particularly young kids) could quite easily make these various mistakes.
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Pendraflare

Age 32
Male
Pennsylvania
Seen July 30th, 2021
Posted March 29th, 2021
6,263 posts
9.8 Years
What I think is that, since TMs are now infinite use, that's why HMs should be deletable on the get-go. In earlier generations maybe not (because they don't want you to be stuck in an area where you'd need them), but here is where it becomes more loose with their capability.
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Male
Seen October 9th, 2017
Posted July 13th, 2017
1,900 posts
9.6 Years
What I think is that, since TMs are now infinite use, that's why HMs should be deletable on the get-go. In earlier generations maybe not (because they don't want you to be stuck in an area where you'd need them), but here is where it becomes more loose with their capability.
Again though, since almost all the TMS are optional finds, what if you didn't GET the TMorHM because you already had the move on a pokemon, forgot, deleted that TMorHM and now you're stuck somewhere where you can't get back to get that TMorHM
Need a specific Berry? I have literally every kind. Need a Friend Safari HA pokemon? I have them all. Need a gen 1 - 3 (and a few from gen 4) Move Tutor Egg Move that can no longer be obtained? I might be able to help. Drop me a DM if you need anything and maybe I can help!
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Age 31
Male
Seen January 1st, 2016
Posted March 27th, 2015
270 posts
9 Years
I wouldn't say I dislike the HM system, but I'm very much ready to move on from it. I appreciated how in X/Y it was very peripheral. Apart from Surf (which most people would use as a legitimate move anyway) and I think Strength, Rock Smash and Waterfall all came into play at the very end, however for the most part, HMs didn't act as roadblocks throughout the game, and the 4 that were needed were all teachable to a single pokemon being Lapras, and you're flat out given a Lapras right after you get Surf, so HM management is very hassle free in that game I appreciated it.

Nearly every JRPG has little roadblocks to keep you on the right path. Some are more subtle or elegant than others, but I'm not going to criticise pokemon for not being super open World like a Skyrim or anything like that. But I do think for the sake of mixing things up a bit Gamefreak could come up with other ways to restrict progression at certain points without the need to stick to the overly rigid HM system.

Colress Machine

The Colress Machine broke...

Age 27
Male
USA
Seen August 15th, 2019
Posted August 12th, 2019
298 posts
9.7 Years
Back when you could only use TMs once, HMs were useful and I didn't mind too much. It was a pain that you had to go to a special place to delete them but I could live with it. Now that we can reuse TMs as many times as we want, I don't see the point for HMs anymore and now it's just a hassle since you have to go to the move deleter to get rid of them.. Especially seeing that some of those moves are soul crushingly useless in battle (-cough- cut -cough-) Just make them all TMs if you ask me.

She/Her
Ryme City
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12.1 Years
I'm actually surprised no one is actually questoning WHY the HM system is in place the way it is. There's a very specific, game breaking reason why they force you to not delete HMs and thats' because there are HM moves that can be learned by some pokemon via level up OR you can transfer pokemon who know certain HM moves:

so say you get to the point where you get the appropriate badge to use a move in the overworld map (let's take cut for example) you have a pokemon from an old game that knows Cut (and since people will fixate on Cut specifically, you can also subsitute ANY Hm for this same scenario) just for the heck of it, you start cutting away to get certain items, you level up, learn a better move and delete Cut and then oh look! You're late for school or work, you save and quit, come back later and start your game up again and oh no! Once you start your game up again all the trees have respawned and since you deleted Cut, you can't get past them because even though you got the badge, yo didn't go to Cutter's House first so now you can't teach anything in your party Cut (or whatever other HM move got you stuck somewhere) and no you need to reset your game and lose the 2, 20 or 200 hours you put into it for a simple mistake that can happen to anyone. THIS is the reason the HM system is in place. in the original Hoenn games if you were on Dewford and had a pokemon with Surf in your PC the game would prevent you from releasing that pokemon from your PC if it was the last one in your PC that knew Surf, even if you had the HM in your items pocket because if you lost all the pokemon that knew Surf in Dewford, you were trapped and could not get off. It's actually an extremely well thought out system.

The same thing happens when you encounter Latias/Latios and you have a full party. If you send the pokemon back to the PC that has Surf, you're now stuck in the other side of Hoenn until you get all the way up to the weather institute and get access to a PC again.

I would MUCH rather be inconvenience by having to find someone to delete the move than not pay attention briefly and lose a move that makes me have to completely restart my game all over from the beginning. For every 1 person complaining about having to delete the move, I can guarantee there would be 1000 complaining if such a game breaking system was allowed to be in the games because LOTS of people (particularly young kids) could quite easily make these various mistakes.
I'm sorry this doesn't make sense to me, in fact I'm not even sure I follow.
So in this hypothetical scenario, you went the entire game without receiving the Cut HM from the Cutter but instead traded a pokemon with the move to your game. Then you deleted it after a use and saved. I fail to see the irreversible dire mistake here.
1.) Why would anyone NOT stop by the Cutter's house for the HM even if they were trading over a pokemon that already knew it. You can actually do it BEFORE receiving the Stone Badge and its not a tedious effort.
2.) If the move was removed from the traded Pokemon why can't this hypothetical player just return to Rustburo and obtain the HM or does the Cutter stop giving it out at some point?

There is also another flaw with this scenario. Unlike in Kanto and Sinnoh which both have at least one required area/route blocked off by a tree every single area in Hoenn that is reached by cutting is optional. One can complete the games without using cut a single time.


Megan

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10.3 Years
The same thing happens when you encounter Latias/Latios and you have a full party. If you send the pokemon back to the PC that has Surf, you're now stuck in the other side of Hoenn until you get all the way up to the weather institute and get access to a PC again.
Just FYI [email protected] can learn Surf, so you're not stuck in this case.

The HM system, while being optimal in its own right, is unbalanced in regards to the newer games. Just keeping them to prevent Gamebreakers isn't good Game Design, it's just lazyness on the developers side. You know "never touch a running system" kinda similar to people who still believe Windows XP is the best OS ever and who are still using it (just exchange Windows XP with Windows 95 for that matter).
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Posted July 13th, 2017
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9.6 Years
I'm sorry this doesn't make sense to me, in fact I'm not even sure I follow.
So in this hypothetical scenario, you went the entire game without receiving the Cut HM from the Cutter but instead traded a pokemon with the move to your game. Then you deleted it after a use and saved. I fail to see the irreversible dire mistake here.
1.) Why would anyone NOT stop by the Cutter's house for the HM even if they were trading over a pokemon that already knew it. You can actually do it BEFORE receiving the Stone Badge and its not a tedious effort.
2.) If the move was removed from the traded Pokemon why can't this hypothetical player just return to Rustburo and obtain the HM or does the Cutter stop giving it out at some point?

There is also another flaw with this scenario. Unlike in Kanto and Sinnoh which both have at least one required area/route blocked off by a tree every single area in Hoenn that is reached by cutting is optional. One can complete the games without using cut a single time.
See? I KNEW people were going to fixate on JUST cut and refuse to read the rest! ;-) Just because you refuse to aknowledge that something can happen doesn't mean it can't happen. You forget that this game is geared to 6 year olds to be able to play, is it really THAT unlikely that people (particularly kids) are just going to rush int o Rustboro and go to the gym? Cutters house is actually incredibly easy to miss, especially if you're just running around to battle. Here's some picture examples (and if you STILL don't understand what I'm saying, I'll know you're being deliberately difficult!):

So I rushed through the game, kinda forgot all about Cutter's house and had no need to look for him because I had a throw away pokemon that already knew Cut from Pokebank. Went through the whole game using it to get through bushes and such so I never needed to go looking for the Cut HM. Got through this bush on route 120, it had 3 blisseys and I leveled up all my pokemon and the one pokemon I had that happened to know Cut could learn a WAY better move so without thinking I deleted Cut for the better move because everything else it had were good moves, I save as lots of people do after secret bas battles, I leave the secret base and OH LOOK, the bush is back. and oh no! I deleted Cut and saved because I didn't think about that bush. How do I get out of this? Oh yeah, I can't. Time to reset the game and start all over again



same deal as before, I have an old pokemon from pokebank or wonder trade that just happens to have strength, i go into the secret base in Fiery Path, same deal as before, I battle the secret base leader in here, level up, delete the crappy Strength for something WAy better, save after my battle because I'm almost dead and have no healing items or repels and I am just going to save every few steps in case I run into some wild encounter I can't run away from and it kills me and OH LOOK, I didn't know the big stone was going to go back to where it was when I first came into the area and now I can't leave. time to reset my game and start all over.

Let's put the ego aside, just becaues YOU don't play the game without exploring everywhere doesn't mean the other 7 BILLION people on this earth play the game exactly the same way. It's a game geared toward children and it therefore needs to be child proof. Are you HONESTLY telling me that you would rather risk having to restart the game all over again because of a game breaking oversight like this just to avoid a few MINUTES of your time to go to a town to get a mvoe deleted? Really? REALLY? Come on! You complain about those few minutes to go to the move deleted, I KNOW you would be with the pitchforks and class action lawsuits against nintendo and game freak if they let something like this happen. Look at the Lumiose City glitch. Who on earth would save in those 4 specific spots just out in the middle of the city I never did, so therefore no one else must have either. Except that, oh wait, a LOT of people saved in those spots and just like those people, a lot of people could accidentally overlook certain HM locations (why do you think there's lists of their locations? Because OBVIOUSLY you can get through the game without finding at least some of them) and people accidentally overwrite moves they don't think they'd need until they get stuck.
Need a specific Berry? I have literally every kind. Need a Friend Safari HA pokemon? I have them all. Need a gen 1 - 3 (and a few from gen 4) Move Tutor Egg Move that can no longer be obtained? I might be able to help. Drop me a DM if you need anything and maybe I can help!
My first battle in a competition, January 2016: I call this "never give up!" :D YNUW-WWWW-WW3F-FMAQ

DyingWillFlareon

Burning Candle

Age 24
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Seen March 11th, 2021
Posted March 10th, 2021
4,308 posts
8.5 Years
I'm kinda torn.
It's a bit like tradition to keep HMs around, aand certainly older fans would whine and conplain that newer players didn't need Cut or Strength going through their games. Plus, the mechanica aren't all that bad. I mean if you use Surf and delete Surf while Surfing(or like Howmander said in the Cut and Strength examples) then you're stuck.
But on the other hand I hate HMs. And iirc in Yellow and all the other Gen I games, there was data for a Surfboard, and in Toxic Purple(a very uncompleted Team Rocket hack) there was a Machete for trees. Maybe GF could go down this new route with using items, of course with mini missions and searching for them left in the game still. I would really like to see this implemented in Gen VII if possible over the old HM system. But HMs could still be normal moves or even TMs, I wouldn't want to see them disappear forever.....

TL;DR- I hate HMs even though iconic to players, let's use new items instead.
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In America
Seen December 2nd, 2020
Posted December 3rd, 2019
161 posts
9.9 Years
Just skimmed this thread. HMs were fine back in the Metal gen but as it is nowadays I have many questions:

- Why can't HM moves be deleted (outside the Move Deleter)
- Why are they mandatory in Gen 6 when they were not in Gen 5
- Why do they still waste a move slot
- Why are HM slaves heavily encouraged, still
- Why aren't all the HM moves useful in some manner considering the above

Really, this is the year 201X, we ought to have either fixed the above or moved away from HMs entirely somehow.