Thing about competitive Pokemon is that it's actually really unbalanced and annoyingly monotonous. You have to have a standard team to stand a chance, anything gimmicky has a very low chance of succeeding, and if it does, it becomes the standard. A LOT of teams in competitive Pokemon are just awfully similar in strategy and premise, and that's on top of the fact you're not rewarded for being smart or strategical, you're rewarded for knowing your facts and match ups. Also, if you're any good at prediction, you have an immediate advantage. :/ That's on top of other things like how match ups can end up being screwed up and annoying (wall vs wall...lol) or how you can pretty much win the game very early with no room for a come back.
Pokemon is very unbalanced competitively.
The problem is that Pokemon simply isn't made for strategic battles or competitive battles. Game Freak has never centered the gameplay around strategy. It's made a few steps in that direction, but its not nearly enough. As long as you are a high enough level and know your type match-ups, almost nothing can stand in your way, in-game. Game Freak also has made some poor or contradictory decisions regarding the metagame and balancing. The one that I find the most strange is that they pretty much introduced Fairies to balance out the overpowered Dragons (which were not really overpowered) by making a another type resist/be immune to Dragon, which was only resisted by Steel. But then they take away Steel's resistance to Ghost (and Dark), making Ghost basically the same as Dragon used to be (yeah Normal's immune to Ghost, but there aint a whole lotta good Normal types). Then there's also mega evolutions; good idea, but why stuff like Blaziken, Garchomp, and Scizor, that were already good, needed mega evolutions, IDK. And Game Freak trolls a few pokes on moves and abilities. Like not giving Rampardos Rock Head. Or not giving Black Kyurem a physical ice attack that isn't Freeze Shock. Or not giving Flareon Flare Blitz until this gen.
Then there's also these 2 sad little facts. The first is that not all Pokemon are created equal. I don't care how much you like Lumineon, its a terrible Pokemon for battles no matter what you do. So its difficult to win with a non-"standard" team. The second is simply the people that play Pokemon competitively. Spino, I know you love your strategizing, but very few people battle to test themselves or get a thrill out of devising clever strategies; they play to win. Most people, myself included, are
not good strategists. You can't really expect good strategic battles outta them since that's the case.
But despite the inherent flaws in the metagame, I think that its really not THAT bad, and that the people who try to make it good have done a fairly good job considering what they have to work with. At least we no longer have to put up with 90% of teams being weather teams like last gen.
I hope y'all don't mind this post, I just really felt the need to comment on that.
I guess I should throw in a few of my own unpopular opinions. Not entirely sure if these qualify as unpopular or not, but here we go:
-English voice acting is NOT bad, at least since 2001. It's very good most of the time. I don't understand why some people still say that the Japanese audio is superior; it's really not.
-I don't care for the side-scroller Mario platformers.
-The ATB system generally seen in the numbered Final Fantasy games is terrible, imo. Don't make me select commands from a menu, but have things go in real time without giving me the ability to move my characters around. Either go full turn based or full real time combat. Don't give me this hybrid ♥♥♥♥.
