Nintendo Switch Pokémon Stars Wishlist: 8 Things We Want To See

1. Do NOT Go Back To The Traditional Pokemon Formula

From Gen 1 through 6, the Pokemon formula was straightforward. Meet the professor. Collect eight badges. Rough up the antagonist team. Beat the Elite Four.

Sun and Moon, however, went in a different direction with the “Island Challenge,” which tasked players with defeating super-powered Pokemon instead of gym leaders. Despite being completely different from anything seen in previous generations, the games still felt like authentic Pokemon experiences, and helped differentiate Alola from every other region explored in the series.

With Stars set to take place in Alola again, it’s no doubt tempting for the designers to simply go back to the tried-and-true Pokemon formula as a means of offering a different experience from the first two games. Doing so, however, would be a major waste of the uniqueness of the seventh generation.

The best way to shake up the established formula is, once again, to take a page from Gen 5’s book. While Yellow, Crystal, Emerald and Platinum all had players retread the same paths they had in each generation, Black 2 and White 2 showed that simply changing up which Pokemon players encounter as the game goes on and the route they take through the region can change the feel of a game in a big way.

Stars doesn’t need to completely reinvent itself in order to feel sufficiently different from Sun and Moon. Hopefully the developers don’t go overboard and undo some of the awesome changes that made Gen 7 feel so damn good.

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What do you want to see from the first Pokémon outing on the Switch? Let us know in the comments!