Discussion How good a job do you think Radical Red does including almost all existing Pokemon?

[Sneavile]

Sorry if this isn't the right place to post this, or if mention of rom hacks is against the rules-- this is my first post here.

I've recently been becoming more and more interested in Pokemon game development, and something that sticks in my mind is the question of "How many obtainable pokemon should your game include?" This is assuming we're only working with existing pokemon, and not fakemon.

I have, of course, read Dragonite's article on the subject, and I agree with many of their points; Finding a suitable place for every pokemon in one region while maintaining good pacing and balancing in your game is a monumental task. It makes perfect sense to cut down the size of the dex like most mainline Pokemon games do. Of course, there will always be that appeal to some people in having access to every pokemon, with no limitations on what you can include in your team. So it makes me wonder if it's in any way feasible to do this, and the closest I've (personally) seen is not from a fan game, but a rom hack in the form of Radical Red.

So my question is, do you think Radical red accomplishes the task of including every pokemon successfully, or is it too bloated/unbalanced? Keep in mind that I'm not just looking for a review of the hack as a whole, or a criticism of it's difficulty-- mainly whether you think having all pokemon squeezed into the region had a positive or negative impact on the game.

For me, I'm not sure. You can't deny that every route in the game feels a bit crowded-- there are between 12 and 20 unique encounters for every location, split between day and night. This is remedied somewhat by the pokeradar allowing you to encounter any specific pokemon on command, but it's still a LOT of choices; early routes in the game tend to have more unique encounters than later ones as well. I would argue the wide selection of pokemon is important for the game's balancing, as it allows the developers to make gyms/bosses much more challenging, since the player has access to many tools for overcoming said challenges. However, the amount of choices is undoubtedly overwhelming for some players, and generally makes most routes feel a bit more unfocused thematically.

What do you think about it? And, theoretically, if you had the opportunity to include every pokemon in your game without inflating the workload, would you do it in a similar manner? How would you go about including all pokemon differently? Would you elect to NOT include all pokemon? Would your answer change if your game was focused on being challenging and employing more advanced/competitive level strategies for battles? I'm interested in seeing everyone's thoughts on this.

 

[ranko]

in my personal opinion, enhancement hacks like Radical Red definitely can get away with not having to adhere to traditional dev practices as opposed as you would developing a new region where you would want the region to feel official and thematically appropriate (with careful distribution and etc)

radical red also selling itself on specifically have a ton of options to tackle essentially buffed version of a familiar league challenge also means that pretty much all the effort on its game design is tacked onto gameplay, with pretty much all worldbuilding and story stuff being completely untouched and practically ignored. You'd probably want to be like, a bit more conservative carefully planning out which mons spawns in which part of your fanmade region according to your regions story and worldbuilding but pure gameplay hacks can be like "you already played kanto, im just gonna mess with the video game portion of it"

theres nothing really stopping anyone (besides time ofc) from doing 50 encounters per route in a fanmade region, but its definitely going to feel extremely offputting and show a lack of thought really put into it other than fanservice. theres definitely been a few better ways to do it that require significantly more effort of course (beeeeg region, post game encounters, lots of events etc)

to the questions: yeah, i dont have strong feelings on adding them all or not (leaning towards a post game route or even just not having all of them) but a competitive focused game can actually go either way. Sometimes a limited selection creates a more difficult game, and force the player to figure out new ways to use mons they normally wouldnt use. But also, having a lot of options to tackle a default powerful opponent can also be fun, since you have massive amount of experimentation to play with. Personally, I'm focusing a ton on environments and such in my region, so clearly there isn't really room for every Pokemon on a standard journey.

It's kinda hard to say if distribution is good or bad?? I'd probably call it out in a actual region (fanmade or otherwise), but RR's Kanto isn't concerned with being a "region" anymore rather than a gameplay experience and challenge. So I guess I want to say, it's technically not really supposed to be regionally balanced, or thematically appropriate, since it doesn't really matter in their case, so they just tonkered with what they wanted lol

 

[Sneavile]

in my personal opinion, enhancement hacks like Radical Red definitely can get away with not having to adhere to traditional dev practices as opposed as you would developing a new region where you would want the region to feel official and thematically appropriate (with careful distribution and etc)

radical red also selling itself on specifically have a ton of options to tackle essentially buffed version of a familiar league challenge also means that pretty much all the effort on its game design is tacked onto gameplay, with pretty much all worldbuilding and story stuff being completely untouched and practically ignored. You'd probably want to be like, a bit more conservative carefully planning out which mons spawns in which part of your fanmade region according to your regions story and worldbuilding but pure gameplay hacks can be like "you already played kanto, im just gonna mess with the video game portion of it"

theres nothing really stopping anyone (besides time ofc) from doing 50 encounters per route in a fanmade region, but its definitely going to feel extremely offputting and show a lack of thought really put into it other than fanservice. theres definitely been a few better ways to do it that require significantly more effort of course (beeeeg region, post game encounters, lots of events etc)

to the questions: yeah, i dont have strong feelings on adding them all or not (leaning towards a post game route or even just not having all of them) but a competitive focused game can actually go either way. Sometimes a limited selection creates a more difficult game, and force the player to figure out new ways to use mons they normally wouldnt use. But also, having a lot of options to tackle a default powerful opponent can also be fun, since you have massive amount of experimentation to play with. Personally, I'm focusing a ton on environments and such in my region, so clearly there isn't really room for every Pokemon on a standard journey.

It's kinda hard to say if distribution is good or bad?? I'd probably call it out in a actual region (fanmade or otherwise), but RR's Kanto isn't concerned with being a "region" anymore rather than a gameplay experience and challenge. So I guess I want to say, it's technically not really supposed to be regionally balanced, or thematically appropriate, since it doesn't really matter in their case, so they just tonkered with what they wanted lol

I guess it really depends on what the goal of the game is then. RR is unabashedly gameplay first, worldbuilding last. Thinking on it more, this is an approach that only really feels right in an enhancement hack; in a fanmade region, without the context of what it's SUPPOSED to be like without additional pokemon, having every 'mon available seems wrong. No mainline pokemon game has every pokemon obtainable in the region, probably for good reason. So if you wanted your game to feel authentic to the mainline pokemon series, you would probably be better off hand-picking what pokemon you want to include to make the region feel cohesive.

In regards to the difficulty, I agree that there's a lot of fun to be had in having access to so many different tools to solve problems. It encourages the player to be creative, but I don't think it's the only way to accomplish this. Something that I admired in the Gamecube games, Colosseum and XD, was how the limited selection of pokemon added to the experience. You don't get access to some of the more popular pokemon, and many of your options are relatively weaker than most other pokemon. This combined with the double battle format forces the player to experiment with pokemon they may not be familiar with, or have never even considered using before, and because double battles are generally more strategic it gives weaker or more supportive pokemon a chance to shine in a world where the most important thing isn't outspeeding and OHKOing the enemy.

So I guess it isn't really necessary to include all pokemon anyways; it's really just fanservice, and if your goal is to provide a fun and challenging experience for the player then handpicking the pokemon available in the region will make it easier to tailor the difficulty of the game, while also making your setting feel more authentic.