Commercial Critique - Pokemon Red/Blue

[Arne]

Regarding monster appearance matching abilities, I've been wanting to do something visual like that since I first saw Pokémon. Each creature would have an anatomical description and stuff like abilities and their stats would be calculated from that. If it has legs it can kick, but the agility and strength of kick would depend on stuff like leg length and musculature and a flying kick would take the entire creature mass into consideration, and the brain's talent for kicking would also have an affect, along with kicking practice and overall fighting experience.

Then there might be special organs like jets producing new kick variants, or clawed poisoned feet amplifying damage upon contact. If such engine could be made to work, each creature would just need a physical and mental description. But I fear it there would be many special cases which are hard to handle. Would a creature with many legs (lobster or crab) be great at kicking, or does the legs get in the way of each other? Maybe the system can handle it by making making such legs slow.

But how about a jumping spider? It has springy and bulky legs but it seems more like it would use a body slam rather than using a single foot as contact point. Maybe creatures with many legs can only do a spin kick. But then we have millipedes with many short legs. Another special case to handle.

[YellowLime]

Hey, very interesting idea actually

But actually, animals with many legs usually have puny legs. Even if you were to invent your own creatures, more legs always means less space for legs, which means smaller legs.
So, a way to solve the issue would be to also take the mass of the feet into account, since kicking with a tiny leg is pretty much futile.

(Unless, the creature were to kick with many of its legs at once... Could it do that? Let's take the creature's balance into consideration... )

And you already mention musculature and body mass... how many independent variables would it take to functionally define a creature? Pokemon, in its apparent simplicity, probably takes about a hundred already (name, level, rarity, personality, base/actual stats, actual/learned/compatible moves...)

Obviously the abstraction has to stop at some point! Else one ends up with 3D data-points of each creature's body part's mass and volume.

[Seiseki]

Obviously the more legs the weaker they get, you'd also have to take into account body weight. An elephant has huge legs because it needs them for support.
A spider doesn't weight anything and has several legs which means each one is weaker.
A creature with only one leg would have a really beefy one, but the problem would be balance.

I think that idea is really cool, I like the whole wysiwyg approach to game design. It's complex beneath the surface, but you can instantly figure things out using logic.
It's a step up from the abstraction that creature stats in games usually have.

But I don't think it's a good idea for Pokemon..

[Pix3M]

Eh... what happened... I was gonna lightly go over each sprite and make a few comments about them..

Anyways... my point from earlier, you can guess that Ken Sugimori wasn't particularly strong as an artist. It does kind of make me wonder how different the pokemon designs themselves can be if Ken was skilled as he is today. Anyone feel the same?

I'm noticing that many of the claws are basically spikes on a stub. Makes sense in smaller sizes like Ivysaur's feet when the resolution is so limiting but it starts looking lazy when they get as big as Hitmonlee or Snorlax.

[Conzeit]

isnt what you guys are talking about where the parts translate into abilites...what Spore did? I know the gameplay famously sucked, but they did put that in.

Pix3M: You do know that Ken only designed the pokemon in the first generation, right? There's a bunch of designers working on them now, including an american in the last generation. Also, he did not pixel the sprites.
http://www.unseen64.net/2009/02/04/pokemon-red-blue-beta/
When you look at the prototype art in Capsule Monsters it becomes pretty obvious that Ken wasnt particularly inclined for the colorful cast of pokemon we have today, in that art half the monsters basically look like a Kangaskhan sans detail, one has a horn so he's Rhydon, another has a shell stuck in it's back so it's Slowbro, etc. Ever notice how Bulbasaur, Morawak, Mew, Kangaskhan all have the same basic head shape?

The colorful cast from now comes from the gameplay addition of types(elements). To visually convey the types they became a lot more creative and they started looking less like caricatures of real animals and more like Pokemon.

In an interview recently he even said his favorite pokemon was this thing http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:White_EN_boxart.png.

I dont want to sound like he's a hack or something, clearly he has done some good designs but most of what we associate the idea of "pokemon" with was a cummulation of factors, not something that came pristine out of this guy's head