Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Gen 6 starters start with their elemental moves

That's what screenshots on the official site show, anyway. Chespin starts out with Tackle, Growl and Vine Whip, and learns Rollout at some point before level 8, Fennekin begins with Scratch, Tail Whip and Ember and also gets Howl at some point before level 11, and Froakie begins with Pound, Growl and Bubble, and it can also obtain Quick Attack before level 8.

First thoughts: Froakie starts out weak compared to the other two! Remember that Tackle got buffed to 50 power in gen 5, but NOT Scratch and Pound, which are still stuck at 40. Maybe they thought of everything and buffed them to match Tackle, who knows? Bubble is a kick to the face too, why not Water Gun when the other two get Vine Whip and Ember? Of course they could've also buffed Bubble, at which point, why not just give it Water Gun to start with?

Also, looking at the screenshots, you can see Vine Whip now has 25 PP. FINALLY. 10 in the first three gens and 15 afterwards was just silly. On top of that, look at all that room! I can totally see why they increased the character limit for Pokémon and attack names. It wouldn't have been as easy with how little room was provided by the previous handhelds, especially considering everything's already so much longer than in Japanese to start with.

10 comments:

  1. This should make the first Rival battle a threat...wait, I am choosing Fennekin...

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    1. Unless there is none, like in D/P, you get a level advantage like in GSC and RSE, or they take away the rival's elemental move like in the second fights in DPP and BW2.

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    2. OR they could pull a trick where your first rival picks the starter who's weak to yours, but soon after you leave and have gotten chance to build levels and a team another, more persistent rival who picked the starter yours is weak to enters the scene.

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  2. i still remember your freakout over vine whip only having 10 pp in one of your first episodes. anyway i think i am going to choose chespin as my starter. still not sure about what version to pick, but there isn't enough information on differences yet anyway. Although as long as the legendary for y isn't dragon type i might choose that one. I'm just sick of dragon based version legendaries and i think a lot of other people are too.

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  3. I always wondered about the character limit for names and moves. I don't have the best idea of how memory allocation works in game design, but I have a feeling strings of characters barely take up any space at all. At least expanding it to 15 characters would have allowed for much more creative freedom when creating names.

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    1. I think in gens 3 through 5, it had more to do with the size of the screens than the hardware itself.

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  4. Where are they? I looked in the X/Y section, but the screenshots aren't there.

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  5. A question that I am curious about is what will be the resolution of the HP bar. Unless I'm mistaken, the HP bar has been exactly 48 pixels since RBY (in the handheld games at least; I'm not sure about the console games). If they're increasing the character limit, then they may just be redoing the user interface from the ground up. It's minor, but it's just one of those things I'm surprised hasn't been done yet.

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  6. Froakie knowing Bubble made me realise that I haven't seen anything use Bubble since Gen I.

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  7. At first I read it as "Gen VI starters start with their elemental punches". Man would that be broken.

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