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What if Gen 10 pulled a Gen 5?

Mothmallow

Mothmallow

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I'm not saying I want or expect this, a thought just occured to me and now I'm curious what others think about it. How would you feel if Gen 10 was another 'soft reboot' the way Black and White were, only having new Pokemon in the main story? I personally don't hold much of a grudge against those games, but I get why many people were upset at the time and in the current day people might be even more angry about something like that. Honestly my main problem with the concept isn't the focusing on new over old, it's moreso the design philosophy of encouraging 100+ news mons in a single gen, when I would personally rather see them cut back on the number of new mons per game moving forward. Gives more spotlight to older mons that got glossed over in their gens, and allows for focus on creating fewer, more interesting new mons over a bunch of dex filler.
So I would prefer it not happen, but I honestly wouldn't be entirely against it either. 10 generations is a pretty big milestone, I feel like they're likely to either push very hard into doing something completely new and out of left field, or pull hard back into nostalgia and comfort with little in between. But that's just my gut feeling, only time will tell.
 
This is a hot take from me, but it’s much more fun to build a team with just newly-introduced Pokémon only. Really gets you to think hehe. You could technically do that with the other games, but in BW they really hone it in. It’s another reason why gen 5 is one of my faves, but this is also coming from the same person who’d like to have a Vanilluxe on her team. XP

So you could guess that I’d find it cool, or open to it at the very least! But whether they actually do it or not, I’ll still be anticipating the new games either way.
 
I don't think they are going to lock people into only using new pokemon ever again. The BW backlash was too big and I don't see a reason for them to risk provoking the fanbase like that when they can just include some old pokemon to keep people happy. Not to mention that including old pokemon is easier that creating 150 new pokemon from scratch to fill the dex.
 
I think still a lot of backlash but less than BW1. At least the games would have a developed post game since they would create areas for older Pokémon.

Unrelated but it’s a bit weird that Pikachu wasn’t available in the Gen 5 games outside of events. Not something GameFreak would do nowadays.
 
I am probably in the minority here thinking it was a genious and awesome idea when they did it with Black & White games. To be fair, if it had happened today, GameFreak has years of improvement to implement this way better than how they did it with Gen V. One of the drawbacks of Gen V was basically using the same concept on different Pokémon (Roggenrole - Geodude, Woobat - Zubat, Audino - Chansey, Timburr - Machop, Sawk & Throh - Hitmonlee & Hitmonchan and the list goes on and on), but now we have regional forms and even further we have echologically similar Pokémon, so "throwback to the previous generations" would have been less of a hassle and with different typing but same concept, people would actually be excited to see those new Pokémon. Alolan Forms never had this sort of criticism like Gen V Pokémon did (aside from being only Gen I Pokémon, but they fixed it in the next generations).

I don't think it would happen, but I'd be genuinely excited if it did.
 
I'm not entirely opposed to them locking us into just the native Pokémon of the new region. Personally, that was never my issue with the original BW lol. It could be fun so long as there is enough new Pokémon to do so, they're probably going to need to design another 150+ Pokémon if they intend to replicate that feeling or do a soft reboot.
 
Personally speaking, I wouldn't mind that. I typically use new Pokemon for my teams anyway, especially at the start of a new generation , so B/W only having new Pokemon available until post game never really bothered me. Plus, there are a lot of cool Pokemon in the fifth generation and quite a few of my favorite Pokemon are in that generation. Design wise, I think it's better to have a smaller generation instead of trying to fill in a Pokedex, but there are plenty of solid designs, even with some Unova Pokemon clearly taking the role of first generation Pokemon.

That being said, I'd be really surprised if they go in this direction. I do remember the backlash to B/W only having new Pokemon available. The games were still popular in spite of that backlash, but I remember the marketing for B2/W2 really emphasizing the return of older Pokemon. Even with the first X/Y trailer, I remember thinking that they wanted to reassure fans that older Pokemon are indeed in the game. I don't think it would create as much backlash as it did the first time, or even compared to other more recent controversies like the National Pokedex, but they probably don't want to risk it regardless.
 
I would always build my first playthrough team out of all new mons regardless, so it wouldn't impact me in that sense. I don't see the harm in having old mons be available for those who want them, though.

My issue would just be that the bigger regional dexes (Kanto, Unova, to a lesser extent Hoenn) have tended to be cases of quantity over quality. Sure, there are always some bangers, but there are a lot of designs that feel like filler or that are just boring retreads of lines from previous gens. I'd rather a tighter, more focused dex where the mons that make it in are just the ones they had cool ideas for as opposed to ones whose existence is justified by needing to hit some kind of a numbers quota. Gen 6 had the smallest batch of new species introduced and imo that really shows in terms of how almost all of its Pokemon actually feel interesting and unique (I know design time being spent on megas was the reason for the small size of the Kalos dex; my point is just that there being very little filler is a nice side effect). I also know there's the whole "every Pokemon is someone's favourite", and mons I might consider filler might be beloved by someone else, and vice versa, but really what I'm getting at is just that committing to only having new mons until the postgame necessitates a certain size of dex, and I don't think trying to fill a prescribed number of slots is the ideal way to design Pokemon. Zubat Line 2 was bland enough; I don't think anyone is crying out for Zubat Line 3.

All of that said, I don't think it's likely, for all the reasons others have said, plus, especially with the direction Pokemon has been going now (open-world or pseudo-open-world), filling out the map requires a lot of mons; not having older species available to backfill would spread a new dex of any size very thin.
 
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I recently started playing BW and having no familiar faces whatsoever really helped with the feeling of discovery

the world suddenly felt new and special again instead of already knowing what's going on already with most Pokémon I saw, it was like watching the anime when it first came out 30 years ago!
 
As for having a region with only new mons that is untenable for a different reason...larger regional dexes.

The games had consistently went for a roster of 400-500 since Gen 6. Therefore making that many new designs would be a very hard ask with how tight the games are. Like "practically demanding that there be no new games for a decade" hard, which while would lead to quality product long term would have catastrophic impact on the merch cycle in the short term.

Also it would mean the national Dex increases by 50% and thus make it harder for people new to the game to make living dexes and more pertinently make it harder for GF to make room for old mons, leading to more spread out main series appearances or more effort to ensure people can "catch em all" without resorting to old hardware.
 
It wouldn't bother me at all if that happens, as i only use new Pokemon in a new generation anyways for my first playthrough runs.

However, i do think its extremely unlikely it happens, due to the way the games are set-up right now with the Open World exploration. If we only get new Pokemon, they need to give us a massive Pokedex with new Pokemon (Around 250), else the Open World aspect of the game is basically pointless if the world is barren due to lack of available Pokemon.
 
After pressure from those-who-shall-not-be-named forced the bowdlerization that was Gen 2, Pokemon has been too averse to taking risks.
 
Personally,I have zero faith this will happen. It seems like they dont want to repeat things they did in Gen 5. I think Gen 5 was a one off of them trying things,but they have decided to go a different way if the later games are anything to go by. Its a shame,as BW are some of my favorite and in my opinion the some of the best in the series to date. They seem unwilling to take risks as they did then and I dont think Nintendo wants them to considering Pokemon is a system seller. Iwata came down hard to make them justify doing a third version,which now they have abandoned. Safe to say,we are not getting a game like that ever again.
 
If I may be honest, I'm probably in the minority of players that don't go for a full team of all new Pokémon when they play a new game. At best, new Pokémon fill out 1 or two slots on my party, those two slots being my starter and something else I thought looked cool. The rest of the slots are filled out by Pokémon I regularly use on my teams or something I haven't used on a team much or at all. For example, when I played Scarlet, my team was Quaquaval, Tinkaton, Gallade, Lucario, Florges, and Dragonite. 2 new Pokémon, 2 regulars, and 2 Pokémon I never used before. When I played Sword, I had Cinderace, Lucario, Gallade, Hatterne, Tsareena, and Toxapex. I feel like having old Pokémon available in new games allows players to not only have their old favorites/reliables on offer as team members, but also lets them see how their old buddies changed in the new games.

With that said, I wouldn't mind if Gen 10 pulled a Unova and only had new Pokémon in the main story, however I doubt they'd do that again. From Gen 6 onwards, every generation has less than 100 new Pokémon. Gen 6 had 69, Gen 7 had 86 (discounting Meltan and Melmetal), Gen 8 had 89 (discounting the Hisuian Pokémon). Only SV passed the 100 bar, but only barely with 103. And these counts were including any late/post game legendary/paradox/Ultra Beast Pokémon, so the number of how many new mons you were realistically gonna get before those points of the game. Granted, the most likely reason why there are fewer new species of Pokémon each gen is because of the new forms these games add, Megas, Regional variants, Gigantamax forms, sort of act like a substitute for new species, but unless those guys have all new dedicated Pokédex numbers, I wouldn't count them as new Pokémon, just new forms of existing ones. Compare the low new mon numbers to the numbers of Gen 1-5, who all sat at over 100. The only exceptions being Gen 2 which only had exactly 100 new Pokémon but that's because Gen 2 was built more like a Kanto 2 instead of its own thing.

It's also worth noting that when gen 5 released with only new Pokémon available, it was kinda hated on at first and the Pokémon designs were commonly criticized. If Gen 10 does that again, I feel that it could fall victim to that same issue again.

However, Gen 10 is special. Not only is it the big 30th anniversary game, but it's being given a 2027 release date, an extra year of care is very notable, especially after SV's rough launch. With that extra time, I feel they might add more Pokémon than usual this time around. Maybe we could see a count of new species akin to the old gens than the newer ones.

TLDR: I doubt it because of modern gens adding less new Pokémon but it's the 30th anniversary so maybe gen 10 will be special.
 
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