THE ABSURD DEPTHS OF THE POKéBLOCK

Just remember guys, the Azure Flute event was "too complicated" to be released

I love how the black pokeblock was made specifically to punish the player for using the same berry only to end up as the most viable one thanks to the e-reader. Truly the greatest comeback of all time.

I was one of the nutjobs who wanted all ribbons on a single mon as a kid. I knee nothing about all this, yet achieved my goal through sheer pure grinding. Man, the things we did as a kid

As someone who has worked as a programmer, this definitely feels like something a programmer/programming team was tasked to implement, but then had no opportunity to work with the other teams about. It would explain why the NPCs give barely any hints as to how Pokèblocks work; NPCs were likely handled by a dedicated person/team, who were only given a rough idea of how Pokèblocks worked.

The more I learn about old Pokemon mechanics the more I'm convinced that developers made them overly complicated on purpose just so people wouldn't try to optimize the fun out of the games. Judging by the videos I keep seeing it would seem that they failed.

All i remember doing with the pokeblocks is mixing berries with a high stat in what i wanted, fed those berries to my pokemon until it didnt eat anymore and i figured it was maxed out for that pokemon and proceded to stomp contests. Man, I had no idea it was this deep.

The black Pokéblock secretly being the most efficient reminds me of how on the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild it's perfectly acceptable to cook and eat wood because restoring 1/4th of a heart when you only have 3 hearts, the game has a Focus Sash-style "live on 1/4th a heart if you have full health" mechanic, and actual food is more valuable in the early game, you can just start eating garbage to top off your hearts instead of wasting apples and stuff

I assume they didn’t want to call sheen “hunger” so that players wouldn’t feel guilty for not feeding their Pokemon, and fill them up with whatever Pokeblocks were available ASAP.

Finally, a comprehensive ressource on all things pokébloc, I now have something to quote in my academic research paper.

As a kid, I wanted a contest-focused game. The gyms were just the main quest. The contests were the one reason I spent hours on the game.

"In many ways, Pokeblocks are a representation of the series as a whole: deep, complicated, and never explained in any capacity." Ah, a formula as old as time. Such a classic Pokemon move. Gotta love it.

keep in mind: these games all have a catching tutorial at the start of the game. the literal fundamental mechanic to the entire series. that everyone and their grandma knows how to do, without even being told. these games are insane.

I remember going on a tear for a few days, plowing through the Beauty contests with ease. My Weezing was the most beautiful poisonous ball of floating gas there was.

It's so weird that they went out of their way to add a side gamemode with contests and then made the process to play it so freakishly obscure AND having it be timegated by having to wait to regrow berries on top of that. What were they thinking??

I love being obsessed with one specific pokemon line because when at 44:30, the typhlosion used surf, i immediately noticed and was like "wait, that's illegal"

Genuinely, the amount of information obfuscation in Pokemon is criminal. You touched on it at the end, but when it comes to competitive it's just insulting. Information gathering is damn near impossible without a million external documents that oftentimes require ripping open the code, but that's just the first step! All the theory and mechanics knowledge in the world doesn't change the fact that actually GETTING a competitively viable team is complete and utter garbage. blisy's videos go into this in the appropriate level of detail, and once you watch those, really the only takeaway is "you know, I get why hacking is so rampant in the competitive scene".

Bro a 55 minute video on gen 3 contest mechanics is the most up my alley thing ever, thank you for making this.

I love a version of black Pokeblock being technically efficient. 4 Nutpea Berry Pokeblock being 1 sheen 1 in all stats is hilarious.

29:58 oh boy I feel so called out. As a kid, after I managed to beat every Master Rank contest, I tried to get my favorite Umbreon to get every Ribbon in my Ruby cartridge, but I obviously knew nothing about the actual math, so I just tried to get the best Pokéblocks I could with the best berries I could get at the time - Spelon, Pamtre, Watmel, Durin and Belue. As you can imagine, I couldn't max any of those 5 contest stats, so I basically had to nail the 2nd phase every time. Some of those contests were hellish, given Umbreon's somewhat limited movepool - God knows how many times I had to retry for some of those. I managed to do it in the end, and somehow I even had the gall to try it again on Gen 4 (it was even more brutal...) Watching the video really made me miss contests, although I don't know if I'd be as invested as I was after knowing all the math and optimizations. I did enjoy experimenting with movesets and combos, but thinking about how much time it takes to get good berries and Pokéblocks... But well, putting in so much time into it was part of the fun. Thank you for the great video!

The 1 feel black pokeblock reversal is exactly the kind of dark sorcery this profane minigame deserves