I am a casual onlooker/granted GM permissions to a Pokemon RPG game that some of my friends are playing. I get to bounce stuff off the GM, and shitpost with them in the discord, since it was the one we used for Curse of Strahd last year.
As I'm catching bits and pieces of the game, I'm noticing something that bugs me, and the behavior it encourages.
- Getting pokedex entries counts towards progression, called Honors, which are also earned for gym badges, contests, and other things.
- It encourages the "touch trading" behavior, which I feel like is awful for a game based around Pokemon.
The reason for my distaste is that when I think "A Pokemon game", I'm thinking more of emulating the show. The game rules though want to emulate both the show and the video games. And that's where the disconnect is with me. The game puts the 'mon you catch at like, ranking 1 or 0 Friendship (out of 5 I think), and trading it resets it to the same low level, so there's 0 punishment for doing it. I see everyone go "OK, I got this, you got that, we'll just trade these two Pokemon around so everyone gets them" and maaaaaaaaaaaaaaan, that sucks to me.
It feels like a bad thing for someone who just wants to catch and befriend some critters.