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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been getting annoyed with Pokémon arceus’s dialogue and this article gives a nice bit of structure as to why:

1. The cost is very high. There is tons and tons of pointless dialogue you’d need to slog through to get to any good bits.

2. The UI is slow and requires tapping a after ~2 lines of text, so an entire conversation ends up being 10+ button presses.

3. All of the text is provided in generic chat bubbles with no interesting/unique/personal touches. The only personal touches are pokemon’s made up noises which should be sounds.

Compare this to a game like Skyrim, where you find handwritten letters, old books, etc

Edit - I feel the need to communicate that the game is incredibly fun and definitely worth playing! The annoying dialogue is hugely outweighed by the great gameplay mechanics.

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Agreed. One of my favorite RPGs as of late, Persona 5, is 130 hours of gameplay, most of which is literally just a visual novel. It avoids dragging on by establishing real, human characters that you want to learn more about. No recorded dialog is required to get you to care, its almost like the writers had worked on syndicated TV before.

Going back to Pokemon is rough. I really like the mechanics and experimentation of the later games, but their stories need a drastic streamlining.

I've not interest in pokemon arceus, but I'd imagine the real problem is that its written for children and is very dull.

> Compare this to a game like Skyrim, where you find handwritten letters, old books, etc

I hate this stuff. Most of them tend to be irrelevant.

> I hate this stuff. Most of them tend to be irrelevant.

This depends on the context of how you are playing. With Elder Scrolls games, a not-insignificant portion of the players are very interested in discovering the lore, which these letters provide.

From the main quest - yeah, 99% are irrelevant to that.

For Elder Scrolls games, that's gotta be at least half the appeal. The main quests usually aren't impressive, and god knows the gameplay is... subpar, to be generous. The discovery aspect, both of the physical environment and in finding little side-stories (that may not even be related to any quest) and tidbits about the world, is much of the point, with most of the rest being the usual RPG mechanic of "make number get bigger".

I love lore in games, but it needs to be connected to the story.

For example the lusty argonian is one of the few books I read, because it was mentioned in the story. I understand that to have a well designed world you need 10x the lore you actually share, so I don't mind there's stuff I don't care about, but in skyrim I feel like they got lazy and created a bunch of lore purely for quantity purposes.

I'm torn on that. It is make the world feel more lived in, but with how boring and mundane it was, it detracted from the sense of wonder. Too realistic makes it boring.

My biggest annoyance with the lore was that I'd endlessly find Generic Fantasy Tale (Part VIII), not having found the first 7 parts yet, and so just be left with some out of context nonsense. Either deliver a novel intact, or don't bother please.

Well yes agreed.

I'm assuming that I-VII weren't available, not just you didn't have them.

The books do provide some in game lore, and are occasionally amusing. The notes and things mostly seem to be an inventory challenge.

I agree, and what adds to that are quite long animations during cutscenes plus the fact that the screen gets blend to black quite often. Slows down dialogs even more.

Also some minor low res textures and visual glitches sometimes threw me out of the immersion as well, but other than that - absolutely excellent game! I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the very first Pokemon games as well.

Cutscenes can end up very drawn out when they are designed so that dialogue and action never happen at the same time. I'm pretty sure the point of doing it that way is because it lets you read at your own pace without encountering any oddities of how the action lines up or jumps around, but it leads to scenes that feel like a slog to get through.

I think the biggest way that games can make that better is to ensure that there are not many delays anywhere in the scene and to write things in a way that doesn't give you way too much information. Like you don't need all the characters describing exactly what you just saw happen. Writing them more like a movie would streamline cutscenes a lot.

In every pokemon game I remember playing as a young child, the default text speed was painfully slow.

I started playing yesterday and have not yet completed the tutorial stuff yet, I quit in the middle of it in fact.

Tutorial is longish and slow, but the game is definitely worth it!

Couldn't agree more. The gameplay elements are incredibly good, but the dialogue and storyline are dreary.

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