7th Gen Did Washing/Brushing/Cleaning/etc. Your Pokémon Annoy You?

[Weasel D. Garp]

Did having to wash/brush/clean/etc. your Pokémon in the Alola region games annoy anyone else? I found it extremely obnoxious that after pretty much every battle the thing would come up that they needed some forme of cleaning and I'd have to do that. I was SO happy in Pokémon Shield when I found you didn't have to do that anymore. Ditto for Scarlet and Violet- it's an optional thing you can do to improve your Pokémon's affection, but you don't have to do it.

 

[Devalue]

Never bothered to do it after the first time. Preferred to raise affection all at once in Pokemon Refresh.

 

[giradialkia]

So, this was the generation before the always-on EXP Share was introduced, but it was certainly a step towards it. It was an interesting quality-of-life addition, but basically it meant that a Pokémon would never finish a battle with a status condition, or any maladies.

Game Freak just wanted to take advantage of the fact that the Pokémon could now be fully expressive, and not limited to a few frames of a sprite. It was mostly a tedious feature, unless you wanted a Sylveon or something.

 

[CoolKid575]

Not really, I found it fun and immersive.

 

[Setsuna]

At the beginning I might've gotten a bit annoyed from it, because whenever any notification pops up I have the need to check it and it's typically hard for me to tune them out. But as I kept playing it usually just turned into me having an opportunity to interact with that part of the game. I didn't really mind getting a pop-up for it because it wasn't mandatory, and whenever I felt like doing it, it didn't take very long and I'd get back to playing quickly. I believe it allowed you to easily cure status conditions as well? That was also a good reason for me to take a second to manage that.

 

[PageEmp]

Not really. You aren't forced to do it and there are no negative effects if you ignore it.

 

[Corveone]

It's not like the mechanic itself annoyed me. I actually played Gen 7 before Gen 6 so during my first playthrough (Ultra Moon) I was new to the Affection mechanic and I kind of liked that new way of interacting with your Pokémon.

My problem came when I learned much later in the game that the reason why my Pokémon were surviving, and dodging attacks, and landing crits they weren't supposed to was a side-effect of the affection system, so in all playthroughs after that one I just avoided that mechanic because I didn't like silly plot-armor bonusses further dumbing down a difficulty that wasn't already challenging to begin with. But I wouldn't mind this kind of optional interactions, if it weren't for those unwanted bonusses.

 

[ReKoil]

I'm pretty sure you didn't have to do it. iirc you have to press a button to do it (Y ?), and if you just don't press it you can skip it.

That aside, I found it fun to do, as long as it wasn't too frequent. When it became too frequent I'd just not press the button for a while.

 

[Weasel D. Garp]

I sort of get attached to my teams when playing (I'm really into the role-playing) so it was harder for me to just skip it. And I liked the high affection of my Pokémon causing critical hits and etc., actually. I just preferred not to have the option show up at the end of nearly every battle to clean them- the Galar and Paldea region games had it great where cleaning them was more something you had to go into a picnic or something for, and didn't have pop-ups appearing almost every battle. And at least in the those later region games, if you go to wash them they don't have dust and loose hairs and etc. on them requiring various different cleaning options- you just wash them, and it's done.