Honestly, this might be a bit of a hot take coming in. But I don’t think the lengthy tutorial is the actual issue when it comes to modern Pokemon games. Plenty of games have very slow openings, monster hunter is the first that comes to mind.

I think the issue is that the game doesn’t actually have any depth behind the initial tutorial. Once you know how to battle, catch, and level up, what more is there? Barring competitive play, the basic mechanics are the entire game.

Legends was a breath of fresh air, because you did have to explore and learn about the world and Pokemon in order to succeed. Even if it was incredibly minimal.

If anyone is still reading this, my recommendation for a game that scratches the deep mechanical and monster collecting itch would be Monster Sanctuary. The story is thin on the ground, and the designs themselves can lean on the simpler side. But my god, I haven’t seen an equal when it comes to team building or strategy. Genuinely fantastic.

When I was a kid I was super into pokemon. I loved playing the games and they stood out to me for one reason: they were challenging. My first game was Black, and I got stuck on the first gym leader for a few days, but when I figured it out it was immensely satisfying. I would hit roadblock, I would struggle, and eventually I overcame it. Then my friend introduced me to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and it got even harder. I honestly think that the final dungeon of Explorers of Time made me smarter or something. It forced my dumbass child brain to think outside the box and find solutions on my own.

Then Pokemon X and Y released, and it was the most stupidly easy game ive ever played. And it kept getting easier after that. Add onto that the worsening quality and I stopped caring about Pokemon. My friend who is really into Pokemon hasnt bought a new game in years, he only plays Romhacks or replays the old games.

I just started playing Violet for the first time last night. I noticed the opening “tutorials” of Sword/Shield took like 90 minutes to get through, and that hasn’t changed much here. And I’m not looking forward to taking biology exams or whatever, I really hope that’s optional content. I just want to battle my way to the Pokemon League!

I’d like a hard mode and a way to toggle exp share off.

If you guys are interested in romhacks/fangames/Pokemon games with a little more meat and difficulty to them, I heartily recommend Pokemon Infinite Fusion. It’s based on FR/LG, with a slightly different story (but it’s still essentially Team Rocket doing Team Rocket things), with the big difference being that you can fuse Pokemon. Every Pokemon in the game is fuseable, giving you a MASSIVE possible amount of combinations. You can play it classic mode, like a regular Pokemon game, but there’s even a randomised mode which changes it up so every wild encounter and trainer battle uses randomly fused Pokemon. It’s great fun!

As for whether modern Pokemon games hold your hand too much, I dunno. I do recognise they’re made explicitly for children, so I can’t tell you how much is too much. In fact, I remember as a child being stumped enough that I quit playing Diamond halfway through because I thought the gyms were ‘too hard’. I still enjoy the newer games (I don’t care what anyone says, I loved SwSh) but I don’t let their shortcomings get to me as I recognise they’re children’s games.

Knowing GameFreak/ the Pokemon Company, if they were to make that mode they’d have it unlock after completing the post-game and if you had both versions (kind of like Black and White 2 easy and hard mode)

I have heard very positive reviews of Casette Beasts, which appears to cater to the Pokemon crowd. I’m not so much into that genre, but has anyone else tried it? It’s on Game Pass as well.

It seems like such an obvious quality of life improvement to introduce a difficulty-like mechanic that asks the user if they are familiar with the series. That way, there could be two tracks to the start of the game: the standard hold-your-hand tutorial for newbies and children, and the streamlined version that skips a lot of the dialogue that explains what pokeballs are or whatnot. While I thought Scarlet/Violet wasn’t the worst offender of some of the recent series, this series HAS been going for decades now and I’d like to see them reflect this in their intended audiences. There is a large child fanbase but there is also a large amount of adults who play after having grown up with the games.

I think issue is Pokémon games are still made primarily for children with age between 6 to 12. There are a lot of older people who grow up with it and some of them righteous feel like they are left behind.

I just finished playing through Pokemon Infinite Fusion and had a great time. I played on hard difficulty and it was a good challenge. Lots of content with a fun central mechanic. I also played it on my Steam Deck so I got the handheld experience. It was a little buggy at times(though I guess that is expected with pokemon now 🙃)

It feels like Gamefreak has really struggled to appeal to the various different sets of fans post Gen 5, I wonder how much of the hand holding and other issues are a reaction to the backlash gen 5 sadly got.

I’ve played both PLA and SV and my impression from both was that the tutorial dragged on for way too long. Even as a new player, that shit should not be lasting for over an hour. Also way too many text boxes that don’t change anything based on what you pick. Just let me play the game please.

I want games like the past, with almost no tutorials at all. Give me pokemon red, yellow where the prof is like, heres a pokemon, a pokedex, and some old guy will teach you to catch a pokemon next door. BOOM, pokemon expert.

While on one hand I completely and totally agree that the games seem to always ignore the seasoned vets of the series. It’s also been very clear that their design choice is to always assume this is your first Pokémon and that you ARE a child since that’s the target audience always. So the hand holding is always a result of that design choice, now obviously there’s better ways to go about it, Pokémon is the only game that treats me like a child for the first 4 hours but then opens the system up and leaves me alone. But I also think it’s been getting better, look at the 3DS generation of games, those things were relentless with its constant “hey look over here and do this!” That it took a lot for me to finish those games.