Should the maximum level cap be decreased/increased?

[Duck]

How is the game approachable to little kids? It is bewildering. You can't work out how to the play the game from information inside the game. It is for teenagers.

It very much is though? Just spamming A will get you quite far, and I should know because that's what I did when I was a 7 ~ 8 year old playing RSE who didn't know a lick of English and so didn't understand any of the text and I still managed to get quite far into the game.

Every generation gives you the basic tutorial of how to catch things, will mention what TMs are (and until Gen VII, force you to know how to use those because of HMs). That's more or less all you need to know really, the battling details like strategy come later, and considering how the games are designed, just spamming whatever strong move you have will work out a lot of the time if your Pokemon have some level advantage.

Newer generations make it even easier by making sure to tell the players about super effective hits and even showing the effectiveness of moves (although I will grant you that the difficulty curve of Gen VII isn't necessarily the most kid friendly, even seasoned Pokémon veterans had a bit of trouble with those in the first playthroughs).

Competitive / Battle Facilities on the other hand, that's a whole different ballpark and not really kid friendly, I'll happily concede that.

But even then we don't need to talk about subjective things like opinions. TPC gutted the Game Corner because it'd increase the ratings from E to 12+, so they've all but outright said they consider kids under 12 to be a core part of their target audience.

Junichi Masuda also said they didn't port the Battle Frontier to ORAS because players these days "get bored and frustrated more easily and they aren't interested in things that are so demanding/challenging." Considering almost every single adult player I've seen talking about Pokemon complain about how the games are easy and not challenging enough, if it was the real reason and not just saving face due to time constraints or something like that, it heavily implies that they're focusing on younger kids.

Ash isn't a teenager, he's a 10 year old because the games are focusing on younger kids and they want those younger kids to see themselves in the protagonists. A same argument applies to most game protagonists, who are 10 ~ 12 ish with a few exceptions.

While there are certain aspects of the franchise which are aimed to older players (such as the TCG or nostalgia bait merch) by and large most of it is aimed to little kids.

 

[cloa513]

I would call 8-11 children preteens. Small children are 5-7 years old. Early generation Pokemon have no explanation of Attack, Defence, Special Attack and Special Defence and Speed. They have little explanation of how to go between gyms. My 7 year old is lost before the third gym in Pokemon Red. He is in tears from how insanely difficult catching some pokemon are and some gyms are like Mauville Gym (he was playing a hacked version of Pokemon Emerald which masqueraded itself as Pokemon X).

 

[cloa513]

And going back to the topic- what has levels and a level cap got to do with being suitable for young children?

 

[Duck]

I would call 8-11 children preteens. Small children are 5-7 years old. Early generation Pokemon have no explanation of Attack, Defence, Special Attack and Special Defence and Speed. They have little explanation of how to go between gyms. My 7 year old is lost before the third gym in Pokemon Red. He is in tears from how insanely difficult catching some pokemon are and some gyms are like Mauville Gym (he was playing a hacked version of Pokemon Emerald which masqueraded itself as Pokemon X).

Sure, we can do this age division if you want, doesn't really matter. It's still fundamentally a game targeted to children.

Stats aren't explained partly because knowing about stats don't really matter outside of competitive. Unless you have very specific kind of Pokemon, just spamming whatever move you have that is stronger will work out a lot of the time, and if you don't, you can do some trial and error and figure it out, which most people end up doing (or at least ended up doing back in the day).

The second reason is that earlier generation didn't have the space we have now, so information like that was usually offloaded to things like game manuals, game guides or help lines. The manual usually came with the cartridges, this is just how retro games worked due to technological limitations of the time.

You can't really judge a retro game by modern sensibilities, outside of the context it was made in and expect it to be a fair judgement about what it was intended to do.

And either way the two examples you gave aren't exactly very good ones because:

- RBY is jank. It had the least space of all the games in the franchise and it's full of glitches, a number of which are very easy to accidentally stumble upon. It was also made for an era where it was expected that 1) you'd have some kind of outside help to learn basic mechanics via a manual or a help line and 2) games were supposed to be harder so they'd artificially last longer despite having less content.

Future generations have better UI so you have more information like base power and move type instead of having to guess, and will outright tell you in many different places where you need to go, but older games have to make do with game design (in your Vermillion case, there's only one path that'll let the game progress, and if you just try every path, eventually you'll make it) and the occasional line of dialog.

- Rom hacks by and large aren't made for novice players, nor are they necessarily well balanced or even properly play tested. More often than not, rom hacks are made with a harder difficulty curve and / or cut out a lot of tutorial padding and stuff since it's more or less assumed that the players already know what's going on.

And going back to the topic- what has levels and a level cap got to do with being suitable for young children?

Because when you have a leveling system you can get a numeric superiority in levels and brute force walls. Type (dis)advantages, strong moves, etc. matter a lot less when you have more levels than the opponent.

My proposal was "No levels" which means you can't just have a level advantage and would need to have some strategic reasoning behinds which moves you're gonna use, most likely needing to use moves that don't do damage (which kids generally don't really care for, since generally they skew to hyper offensive play styles).

Also, please don't double post. If you have something more to add to a previous post, edit it in.

 

[Janp]

I don't think levels affect the gameplay that much and changing just the number of levels won't solve this problem.

 

[cloa513]

There is the school in Pokemon Red et al which has status effects- if you meant use the manual to learn why is that there. No reason they couldn't have used minor NPCs to teach all the game mechanics rather than some of rubbish that they actually.

 

[cloa513]

Level as gain stats or levels are gain moves/evolution opportunities plus stats- that is a question?

 

[Duck]

There is the school in Pokemon Red et al which has status effects- if you meant use the manual to learn why is that there. No reason they couldn't have used minor NPCs to teach all the game mechanics rather than some of rubbish that they actually.

Because manuals also have limited space. They fit in the game's box and couldn't be very big, so when they had an excuse to put things in the game, they did, and when they couldn't find a natural way (like say, listing the entire type chart and effectiveness) they put it in the manual.

That said, even then, they did warn you about some effectiveness before gyms, iirc the gym guide will tell you what's effective against the gym leader you're facing. The manual tells you a lot more about controls and some finer mechanics, and if you need more help, there were always the game guides (after the game got popular).

Plus, some of the NPC mentions were there to have other purposes (hint at some other mechanic or to set some kind of flavor) and giving a full explanation of some mechanics could need more space than they could spare.

There's a lot of problems with the Pokemon franchise, specially in the earlier generations, but in RBY they only had 512 KB to work with, including images, music, text and code, and that was considered to be quite a lot for a Game Boy game at the time.

They had to cut off corners and hope external sources or just sheer attrition / word of mouth helped them as friends would help each other as they discovered secrets. It was a design decision that apparently paid out.

Either way, we're veering off-topic. The merits of this school of retro game design, how appropriate the games are for younger kids or whether they are aimed at kids at all don't have a lot to do with this thread.

If you wish, you may post a thread in Previous Generations to discuss whether the game design in earlier generations was "good", assuming you explain what you mean by good. Or, you may post a thread here in Pokemon Gaming Central to discuss whether the game design in the franchise as whole is "good", under the same circumstances.

If you want to discuss the target audience of the games, also post a new thread here in Pokemon Gaming Central and if you want to discuss the target audience of the franchise in general, please post a new thread in Pokemon General.

Let's keep this thread on-topic and talk about how the level mechanics affect the game.

Level as gain stats or levels are gain moves/evolution opportunities plus stats- that is a question?

I don't understand what you mean here, but I'm assuming this has to do with what I said my proposal was.

By "no levels" I meant that effectively all Pokémon behave like they are at a fixed level, like say, level 100, and they didn't gain any kind of experience, only EVs. Evolution and moves would be obtained by different mechanics like move tutors, TMs / TRs, friendship, items, move releaner, etc.

Also, once more, please do not double post.
If you have something to add after you posted, nobody else has posted anything and it hasn't been a long period of time, please edit your post.
There's an icon in the bottom right corner of the post saying "Edit".

Edit: Changed my stance a bit, but still, please no double posting.

 

[Hermione Granger]

The level cap should stay the same imo. Even if I don't grind my pokemon to level 100.

 

[Corveone]

By "no levels" I meant that effectively all Pokémon behave like they are at a fixed level, like say, level 100, and they didn't gain any kind of experience, only EVs. Evolution and moves would be obtained by different mechanics like move tutors, TMs / TRs, friendship, items, move releaner, etc.

Yeah, I agree that would be interesting to see. Levels are only really needed for learnsets and evolutions. Levelling-up just for the sake of watching numbers go up in Pokémon games is just an illusion of progress.

If you can blindly stomp any opponent by simply going 15 levels above the intended level curve, you barely need to pay any attention to your movesets, type match-ups or battle tactics, nullifying key aspects of Pokémon gameplay.

Levels have more purpose in games like The Witcher 3 or Dark Souls, which have at least some degree of open world-esque freedom. So sometimes you can go to different places, but if you go a certain path too early on you might get crushed by super powerful enemies, making you think "ok, guess I'm meant to go that other area first and come here later, with more levels, better skills, equipment and so on."

But Pokémon games are already linear, and don't need the level curve to stop players from going a certain way because they already do that with literal road blocks. You never have to worry about your early game team being challenged by a trainer with level 50 mons, because some road block will simply prevent you from even accessing the area where that trainer is.

 

[Fairy]

I could take it or leave it honestly. 100 is sorta the penultimate number when it comes to being "leveled", but if GF wanted to shake up the formula -- I'd invite them to try raising/lowering the level cap! Lord knows we've been getting the same content for long enough, yeah? But if they didn't, I couldn't be bothered to complain about it either.