I am playing Pokemon Violet at the moment and it is a total bore. I have played the game so many times and I just want to run around catch Pokemon and battle.
I do not need another tutorial about what a Pokemon center is. Or a tutorial to tell me that I need to use a Pokeball to catch a Pokemon.
Can we get a “I’ve played this game 100 times” mode where it just saves the tutorials and lets us play the game?
If you guys are interested in romhacks/fangames/Pokemon games with a little more meat and difficulty to them, I heartily recommend Pokemon Infinite Fusion. It’s based on FR/LG, with a slightly different story (but it’s still essentially Team Rocket doing Team Rocket things), with the big difference being that you can fuse Pokemon. Every Pokemon in the game is fuseable, giving you a MASSIVE possible amount of combinations. You can play it classic mode, like a regular Pokemon game, but there’s even a randomised mode which changes it up so every wild encounter and trainer battle uses randomly fused Pokemon. It’s great fun!
As for whether modern Pokemon games hold your hand too much, I dunno. I do recognise they’re made explicitly for children, so I can’t tell you how much is too much. In fact, I remember as a child being stumped enough that I quit playing Diamond halfway through because I thought the gyms were ‘too hard’. I still enjoy the newer games (I don’t care what anyone says, I loved SwSh) but I don’t let their shortcomings get to me as I recognise they’re children’s games.
Re fangames, I’d also recommend Pokemon Insurgence. It has a darker story than most Pokemon games, but it’s also more difficult as well. It has challenge run options in-game if ya want to run a Nuzlocke or something like that.
A big second here for Infinite Fusion! I just found out about it a couple weeks ago and I’ve been absolutely loving it. It’s certainly the classic Red/Blue storyline, but with just enough changes to the maps/story to feel fresh and interesting. The fusions are so much fun, especially the community created art. I wound up finishing my first run with an entire team of Monster Hunter themed Pokemon. Now I’m trying out the randomizer mode and it’s such a blast. Despite browsing the discord for a while and seeing dozens of Hall of Fame teams I’m still finding fresh fusions constantly, it’s really amazing.