Nintendo Switch

He's a bit like Mario in that you can squeeze him into any gimmick or concept and help the product sell

Mario doesn't normally use guns or have much to do with isometric strategy games but nobody's going to buy a game about the Rabbids doing all that without one of gaming's hottest IPs helping it sell.

Same principle.

To be fair, everybody thought Mario x Rabbits was weird as hell too.

It is weird. It doesn't make any sense and almost any other set of characters and setting would of been more logical to use

but who cares it's a new Mario game that also happens to be good.

Now I kinda want to see a Mario Farming game.

Honestly, I could get behind that. I'm fond of Lower Deck Episodes and mundane situations in fantasy worlds, so it could be a family of toads working their farm while there's some epic Mario vs Bowser thing going on in the background.

I like the idea of the game as a Lower-Deck Episode but I think we already have enough Toads running around. Maybe as supporting characters or something.

Edited by JapaneseTeeth on Mar 1st 2019 at 9:05:37 AM

Waluigi's Harvest.

I mean, speaking of Pokemon, I would have expected that to cross over with Harvest Moon. Then again, Pokemon is one of those things that can be crossed over with almost anything and still make sense.

Edited by Anura on Mar 1st 2019 at 3:20:36 PM

And conversely, crosses over with almost nothing. Because TPC.

It's crossed over with things.

Those things are just invariably mediocre to bad with maybe the exception of the Mystery Dungeon series, and that's probably not going to change any time soon.

Almost nothing compared to what it could be crossing over with.

And Conquest was pretty good. There are the bones of a really fantastic game under there, if they had continued to explore it.

I think that's the kicker.

Pokken has the bones of a good fighting game, too but it's so anemic in terms of features and behind the times in everything from its presentation to its online capabilities that no one cares about it.

Every Pokemon everything reaches for something decent but comes up short. The mainline gets away with it but I don't think people are willing to give the spinoffs the same free pass unless they're literally free like Go.

Edited by Hashil on Mar 1st 2019 at 8:29:08 AM

I don't think people don't care about Pokken because it didn't come out the gate as polished as established fighting game series. I think the bigger problem is that they're almost no overlap between Pokemon fans and hardcore fighting game players. Most Pokemon fans would have prefered a more casual game that had triple the amount of playable characters, and many fighting game fans aren't into something like Pokemon and assumed it would be a casual game.

I would love to see a Xenoblade or Fire Emblem-styled Rune Factory.

Look at Smash Bros, though. If a fighting game headlined by Mario, Pikachu, and Princess Peach can go on to shatter records and sell millions I don't think Pokemon - who's audience is so huge it's the world's biggest multimedia franchise - would have any problem attracting at least a comparable audience.

A lot of Smash players from all skill levels even tried the game early in its lifespan before it was clear most people just didn't care about it.

Smash Bros benefits from coming out during the N64 era, being party-friendly, and being SUPER EASY to pick up and play.

Smash Bros. was primarily a casual game before it became apparent that a large hardcore audiance exists for it, and I would say it has a bigger focus on fanservice over balance than Pokken does. And it took a couple games in the series and a few more years after that to really have a large hardcore audiance on par with other fighting games. And said hardcore audiance has almost no crossover with the rest of the fighting game community.

Pokken on the other hand was made by developers who make other fighting games, and put lot of focus on competetive balance and mechanics over just being a fanservice game. From what I've seen, many fighting game players saw that it was a Pokemon game with 3D arena mechanics and assumed it was something similar to things like some of the DBZ, Naruto, and Gundam fighting games, or Final Fantasy Dissidia, and disregarded it, when it's not that similar to those games. And there's no reason Smash players would like it anymore since it plays more similarly to 'traditional' fighting games than to Smash Bros.

So I stand by that the audiance waiting for a competetive Pokemon fighting game that uses a blend of 2D fighter and 3D arena fighter mechanics was non-existent, and many people it could potentially appeal to didn't give it attention.

I'll concede that Pokken has a very confused core audience and that contributed to its indifference? Not failure, since apparently it sold alright.

But I can't help but notice that for its size there's no Pokemon equivalent to Mario Kart or Mario Party, or any of the other Mario spinoffs that proved appealing enough to a wide audience that they could go on to become their own subfranchises.

Besides Go, you mean.

Here's actually something else that I find odd with Pokémon spinoffs. When they hit on something that people do like, they immediately abandon it. Pokémon Snap is probably the most popular spinoff, and they never made another one. Pokémon Stadium is a brilliant idea; it never got past the N64. They do a couple single-player narrative-based console games for the Game Cube, and then never go back to the idea.

Edited by BadWolf21 on Mar 1st 2019 at 10:24:16 AM

Battle Revolution is basically Stadium but on the Wii, and the main series switching to 3D for 3DS more or less removed any value in further entries.

For other spinoffs: As someone who played all the Ranger entries, I think they more or less played the concept out. Same for Rumble. And Mystery Dungeon has cropped up every couple years, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a new one this year or next.

Edited by burnpsy on Mar 1st 2019 at 11:44:41 AM

Notice how I didn't include any of those. They were always more niche. The Coliseum games are too, I suppose, but the point stands for Stadium and Snap.

And if you want to extend it to Mystery Dungeon, Explorers of Sky was super popular with fans of the subseries, and then they pulled back hard on the next game.

Except I more or less countered the Stadium point. The only thing Stadium has that Battle Revolution doesn't are minigames.

Mystery Dungeon is clearly the most successful of the subseries, so it'd be very hard not to count it. While they went in the wrong direction with Gates, they fixed most of the problems with the next game.

Edited by burnpsy on Mar 1st 2019 at 11:49:52 AM

I don't have any real proof of this, but I imagine TPC is probably somewhat difficult to work with, considering that even Nintendo seems to have a harder time putting Pokemon stuff in their games than they do other second-party stuff like Kirby or Fire Emblem. That probably makes it harder for outside teams to make new spin-off games. But I have another idea on why Pokemon may be weird with its spin-offs. I get the feeling that TPC mostly treats spin-offs like experiments or novelties more than an avenue to have popular sub-series seperate from the main games. They probably feel that outside the main games, the physical merchandise is the big money maker to focus on, and they're probably right since the money to make Pokemon the more profitable franchise in history has to come from somewhere.

Like I remember someone at Gamefreak or TPC saying that there's no reason to make another Pokemon Snap because photography isn't a new thing that attracts interest in and of itself anymore. Which isn't something that means much if you just want to make a photography-based game series, especially one that many fans will buy, but they probably just viewed it as an experiment, and now that there's no more novelty in the main gimmick they don't care anymore. They've said that there's no reason to make another Pokemon Stadium/Colosseum/Battle Revolution because the main games are already in 3D. That doesn't mean much if you're focusing on how those games give a different experience from the main games while using the same battle system, but likely the novelty of the 3D graphics is all TPC cares about, so there's no reason to make it anymore now that the novelty is gone.

Pokemon Ranger was fairly successful and had three games, but Creatures was probably just making it to experiment with the stylus controls, and after the novelty wore off they wanted to go do something else instead. Detective Pikachu may been made by Creatures as an experiment in making a 'cinematic' Pokemon game, and despite ending with loose plot threads I wouldn't be surprised if they only make a sequel because of the movie.

Pokemon Conquest may never get another game because after doing it the first time the novelty is worn off, and Techmo Koei probably has little reason to push for it since it's not like the game helps their Nobunaga's Ambition brand, at least outside Japan, and I doubt there were any major developers working on it who are pushing to make more. Following this idea, it's up in the air if Pokken will get a sequel since TPC may not care since the novelty would be gone, and it's another competetive community they would have to manage alongside the main games and TCG, and Namco has their own fighting games they could be focusing on instead. I'm going to guess that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon has been pretty consistent so far because Chunsoft pushes to make it over TPC. Considering they own the Mystery Dungeon brand, it's made by the same team as other MD games as far I know, and it probably sells better than other MD games, I imagine Spike Chunsoft has more to gain by making the PMD games than TPC does.

I still think the Detective Pikachu game exists primarily so that when they unveiled the film the hardcore fans would defend it by saying its accurate to the game. Or at the very least the game to prepare the movie in general.

I didn't even know that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon was a crossover between Pokemon and a game series called Mystery Dungeon. I just learned about the latter right now from reading that post.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Mar 1st 2019 at 10:27:48 AM