>>16198525At the risk of being the odd one out, it's actually my favorite route.
That they replaced random encounters with wandering dust clouds was such a cool thing I immediately wished the entire game had done it; roving grass rustles and water bubbles and cave dust.
I personally fucking hate random encounters, I think they're antiquated and stupid. If I want to avoid fights I should run from them, and if I want to get into fights I should chase them down. I shouldn't just get tossed into them at random and hope for the best, it's lazy game design from an era when it was the best that could be managed.
This was always tempered, for me, by the understanding that Pokemon, being a game about turn-based combat and common-rare encounter differences, couldn't just have real-time fights or visible overworld monsters like most games.
But having the "encounter" itself as an entity roaming the overworld that you could try to avoid or chase, that would make getting/skipping wild fights a matter of skill rather than dumb luck and button mashing, was a brilliant fix for that.
If they make future games with an option to switch all encounters into this type of roving rustle rather than just random appearances, I will never turn it off.
