KHALICANVAS STUDIOS'S PROFILE

author=slashphoenix
For sure!

I would say that in Pokemon, fishing is just another branch that extends from the core of the sweet gameplay tree that is Mystery and Exploration. I can't speak to the Pokemon games nowadays, but one of the major appeals of Red/Blue's gameplay was the whole mystery of the thing. Encountering crazy rare pokemon in one patch of grass on the south side of nowhere was so damn cool feeling - it creates this sense that anything could be anywhere - and the players have no idea where the limits are. If the Pokedex didn't hint that there were only 150 Pokemon, some kid could easily believe there were several hundreds!

In many ways Pokemon is all about discovery. All of the minigames in Pokemon (that I can remember) had to do with this discovery. Gambling to get HMs (which were labeled with a number and nothing else), the Safari Zone's rare Pokemon, and fishing to increase the number of places the little buggers could be hiding all added to the core exploration. I would go so far as to say that the path to Victory Road is just a good excuse to take you through the entire Pokemon world and show off all the things you could explore.

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The combat in Pokemon might have been simplistic, but do you remember the feeling of seeing an Gym Leader's Pokemon and wondering where the hell he caught something so cool looking? Or when your Pokemon learned a new move you'd never heard of, or started evolving into who-knows-what? That stuff gave me shivers when I was 10.

So, in the end, fishing made Pokemon totally awesome. Hell, I've got nothing against fishing mini-games in general if they're fun and add to the experience. However, minigames are one of those things I see so many try to add to their RM games, when they aren't even really making the game more fun and are only sacrificing focus.