>>54879745I used to think Seasons were the bomb. I played Black when it came out and then sat out Pokemon for a while, having come back to it fairly recently. I've been playing White 2 for the first time, and I've decided that seasons are a waste of effort/dev time.
It's an RPG and despite having a mostly open world, you're going to progress through it linearly. How often do you backtrack through an area? Are you even going to remember a random route well enough to be able to tell what's changed between spring and summer? Apart from snow on the ground, the difference is pretty minor for the majority of the game. Since you aren't going to backtrack much, having different pokemon in the wild based on the seasons doesn't really matter. All it means is that your available wild pokemon are determined semi-randomly based on what season it was when you started playing.
Yeah there's a couple dungeons whose layout drastically changes based on the season. But you're probably not going into the same cave/mountain/etc twice. The fact that it has different layouts based on the season ends up not really mattering at all. What's really happening is, you're getting a random layout chosen from two options based on when you started playing, and you'll never see the second on. So what's the point of even having it change? You aren't going back to the sewers to see the flooded/dry version after you saw the other one the first time.
You could cut the changing seasons gimmick and just make the game randomly pick one season that stays on for the entire game, and have exactly the same experience when playing. It was a neat idea, but like a lot of ideas in the mainline games, it turns out to be kind of pointless and lame. I will say this much, they at least they fleshed this mechanic out. Different visuals, different wild pokemon, different dungeon layouts, different items, and a whole two-stage line with four forms to go with the mechanic. Compare to, say, the Sky Battles in X/Y.
