>>44506055The main series is, and always has been, fundamentally bad from a game design perspective largely because of its rampant overuse of RNG.
>It's random on what tile a wild Pokemon encounter starts (granted you are in tall grass, in a cave, or on water)>It's random what Pokemon is encountered when an encounter starts>It's random what level a wild Pokemon is when you encounter it>It's random what IVs a wild Pokemon has>It's random what IVs are passed on during breeding>It's random whether any individual Pokemon is shiny or not>It's random whether or not a move hits (granted you're using any of the more than 400 moves with sub-100 accuracy)>It's random whether a move with extra effects actually has those extra effects happen>It's random how much damage each individual move doesNo other RPG series I know of uses RNG this much, in places this integral to the gameplay. And I think I know why.
Pokemon suffers from a form of the resource curse - the series' immediate popularity upon the release of Gen I and lack of serious competition meant that Game Freak never had to experiment to find design space that far outside the series' established formula.
That might not be a problem for other, newer series, but the Pokemon games started on the original Game Boy, an incredibly limited system with incredibly limited cartridges. The level of RNG present in Gen I was - and should have stayed - a crutch for the Game Boy's lack of available cartridge space.
