#POKEMON ROADBLOCK GAME FULL#

Battle Frontier was a lot easier to add in Emerald and Platinum compared to how much it would require now. Not bringing back unpopular features has been a thing in gaming for.ever? Across pretty much every franchise.

The dev process itself having serious issuesĪll of these issues can be addressed without going back to HMs, the problem is that GF won't or can't (due to resource constraints) do so.

A large chunk of the region being upended for the Wild Area.

The BW route design philosophy reaching peak absurdity.

What happened in SwSh, imo, was due to three factors: Even SV has small islands off of the mainland that will definitely require Surf and Fly to reach.

#POKEMON ROADBLOCK GAME FULL#

And even in new maps, the mount system Arceus uses still allows for a metroidvania-esque progression - getting the Surf mount and going back to the first two areas allows you to reach notable chunks of the map that have Pokemon that are otherwise rare (Chimchar and Goomy lines), while the Rock Climb and Fly equivalents allow for full vertical exploration and finally getting all Wisps in each area. BDSP replaced HMs and I don't see how that affected exploration in that. Hoenn has good sea routes because there are interesting mechanics and things to find in the sea, but Game Freak decided that all the cool Water-types would be fishing encounters and people didn't want to buy Repels, so we're done with current puzzles and undersea exploration now.Ĭlick to expand.I don't see how removing HMs led to this tbh. There's been a number of ways to extend water traversal beyond Surf - Whirlpool, Waterfall, Dive, Sharpedo Jet - which can help make sea routes more interesting, but since the games don't have many of these, there's no reason to do so. This is compounded by the turn away from sea routes post-Hoenn. The best modern Pokémon games for this type of route design are Gen VII, since the Poké Ride is about as extensive as HMs were.

Aside from enabling more natural roadblocks to impede paths to later areas, part of what fleshes out some of the older routes and areas is being able to revisit them with new means of traversal, but since newer games don't tend to use them to restrict access to areas, there aren't as many opportunities to build backtracking into areas, which means there's no reason to revisit them. Hard to talk about linear regions and the loss of cool backtracking moments without mentioning the deemphasis of HMs.

Pokemon roadblock game