>>54640834This feeling is almost impossible to replicate now, though, because that discovery has been tainted by our understanding of the game.
Nobody goes in entirely blind anymore.
Even if you ignore every single online resource, you'll still know the basics of a pokemon game.
There's no more "ooh boy, Ratmon 4, I wonder if it'll evolve into something cool".
You KNOW that bar maybe a single exception, almost every early game pokemon will generally be crap tier outside of some specific meta strategy and they'll all look like shit.
The only way to even kinda get close to invoking this feeling again would be to do a very careful balancing act by:
>Increasing the number of available pokemon in each area, massively, from the get go.This means that for a typical "child-like" runthrough of an area, you WON'T see everything. You basically can't. It also makes it seem special when you see other trainers using pokemon you haven't seen, because you'll have to try and figure out where they got it.
This adds back a lot of the mystery about which pokemon are where and the seemingly endless scope of the game.
Obviously the internet can instantaneously ruin it, but it still enables people to share where they found a such-and-such.
It also adds a new mechanic: Giving pokemon the feel that there are countless pokemon ought there and each biome has a unique variety. If you're hanging out in a flowery field in the day, you'll find different pokemon than a grassy field at night.
>Limit the number of captures you can get in each area strictly, for the early to mid game only.This forces players to make do with a smaller number of pokemon and either a) focus on finding some specific rare pokemon they think is here or b) explore the game with a smaller number of pokemon caught for the majority of the game
This encourages each player's experience to be significantly different and starts to bring back that team-comparison thing that made the earlier games fun. "Wow, you caught a WHAT!?"
