Originally Posted by
Val the Moofia Boss
I'm hoping GAME FREAK will announce Pokemon Stadium 3, but given that they believe that the new main series titles with 3D Pokemon have (somehow?) replaced Stadium, it seems unlikely.
People like me loved Stadium for two reasons: the in depth, customizeable challenges that no Pokemon game since has been able to capture, and the rental Pokemon. Stadium allowed you to pick from a variety of different tournament rules. Do you love unevolved Pokemon? Try the Little Cup! Do you want try a hardcore mode? Try the Challenge cup, where your Pokemon are randomized and you have to make do with what you got. Furthermore, each battle was very tightly tuned, so you had to know your 248 available Pokemon, their moves, and their abilities to succeed. For once, Pokemon required actual strategy to win, and you couldn't just spam the same one over and over again for each match.
Rentals were the other reason why I loved Stadium: raising Pokemon for competitive play in the main series is an absolute nightmare. First, you have to catch and breed the Pokemon you want over and over and over again until you get the right nature, and even then, you might have to breed some more to get the right ability and the best starts that Pokemon can be born with. Next, comes the hour and a half of EV leveling in either the tedious super training mode, or three hours incredibly boring horde battles. Then you have to farm the Pokemon League three or four times to get the Pokemon up to level fifty, possibly even higher if there's a move you want that is learned at an even higher level. But wait! There's more! You still have to slog through several hours of tedious Battle Chateau/Tree for the BP before your Pokemon is even ready for competitive, and god forbid if you were planning on building a strategy that required multiple Pokemon, let alone anything larger than a party of three. I have five hundred hours invested in the 3DS Pokemon games, and the vast majority of that time was spent not playing competitive or endgame, but instead just making the Pokemon required to play it, and I didn't even have that many. I have... maybe ten options? Steelix, Drapion, Skuntank, Mismagius, Toxicroak, Honchkrow, Mawille, and Altaria... and that's it. If I want to play competitive or try to make it for as long as I can in the battle chateau/tree, that's literally all I can pick from unless I want to invested well over a dozen to two dozen hours of tedium required to make more.
When I realized that Sun's endgame was no different from ORAS and XY, I decided to just turn off the 3DS and go back to Stadium 2. Because 1. the fights are actually enjoyable (thanks to each fight being preset and tightly tuned by the game designers, and to effective camera work that makes it exciting to watch), and 2. I can just jump right in. Pick a cup, prepare your strategies, research your mons, pick your mons, and you're in.
As bad as Pokemon Battle Revolution was, there's a reason why I spent more time playing that than I did the 4th gen games.
Seriously Game Freak; how can you not see the appeal of the Stadium games? Why are you puzzled that your fans have hated the mainline game's endgame for two generations?
If Pokemon Switch has a Stadium mode, I'll lay down my $350 on the spot.