>>25350767I mean, don't get me wrong, I totally could do that, but... there's just not enough substance to the island to make it feel like it's part of the rest of the game. Sure, it looks cool, I guess, but that's really it.
I think if anything else, the best way to fix Pelipper Island would be to give it a less sterile intro. Maybe have Lapras surfing its way towards the island, talking to you while you're not in the frame, and then it gives you the prompt to choose who to control. Then you get to Pelipper Island. Even something as simple as that would help it feel more natural to me. As it is it's just too bland.
>>25350648I always felt like the groups worked pretty well for assigning each group a different "class" (which is why I brought up Etrian), but I can see what you mean. Like, Charmander's IQ group is very offensively-focused, like a warrior or such. Then Blastoise has more defensive stuff like tanking hits for other team members and stuff, so he's a tank. That sort of thing.
That said, that was back when there were 492 Pokemon, not over seven hundred. Nowadays it'd probably be too much work to divvy up all those mons into a small pool of groups, so what you suggested would probably be better.
