Hello Smog people. My article idea is called "Beyond The Hex" and it would be an indepth look at how the Pokemon games changed in between Crystal version and the release of Ruby/Sapphire. In my opinion, this was a hugely significant transition period for the Pokemon game series where it went from being a little game that found success on a lark to a franchise that Nintendo could reliably milk conceivably forever. The title has to do with one very concrete example of that - Pokemon were identified within the RBYGSC's data with hexadecimal values between 0 and 255, and thus in order to expand after the 251 Pokemon in GSC the entire way the games were programmed had to revamped from the ground up.
This could be a single article or a series of articles, covering some of the following topics:
1. Key Members of the Gamefreak Pokemon team such as Ken Sugimori and Junichi Masuda.
2. Game mechanics such as the DV system and damage formula
3. The different regions in terms of "level design"
4. The story being told in each pokemon game
5. Spinoff Games
6. and of course the monsters themselves.
There's also a variety of other topics that fall under this umbrella - pretty much every aspect of the franchise went through huge changes around this time. I know you have some articles that cover similar topics, but this article's focus on the transition from 2nd to 3rd gen give it a unique niche in the article metagame. That period is hugely important for the way we play and talk about Pokemon today, but most coverage I see of especially the 3rd gen will acknowledge a few of the facts without delving fully into the implications (and looking at some other facts that lie beneath the surface).
Finally I'd like to note that I am very Gen II and before biased (I first got an idea like this when I realized how much more fun I had playing the original Gold version after beating HeartGold) but would keep this series as neutral as possible - at the end of the day, some changes have been for the ludicrous (the increasing slide of legendary pokemon into bland vaguely dragon shaped spikiness) while others have been very much for the better (pretty much everything metagame based). The main purpose of these articles is to catalogue these different changes and help start more critical conversations about these games that are obviously very important to everyone here.
This could be a single article or a series of articles, covering some of the following topics:
1. Key Members of the Gamefreak Pokemon team such as Ken Sugimori and Junichi Masuda.
2. Game mechanics such as the DV system and damage formula
3. The different regions in terms of "level design"
4. The story being told in each pokemon game
5. Spinoff Games
6. and of course the monsters themselves.
There's also a variety of other topics that fall under this umbrella - pretty much every aspect of the franchise went through huge changes around this time. I know you have some articles that cover similar topics, but this article's focus on the transition from 2nd to 3rd gen give it a unique niche in the article metagame. That period is hugely important for the way we play and talk about Pokemon today, but most coverage I see of especially the 3rd gen will acknowledge a few of the facts without delving fully into the implications (and looking at some other facts that lie beneath the surface).
Finally I'd like to note that I am very Gen II and before biased (I first got an idea like this when I realized how much more fun I had playing the original Gold version after beating HeartGold) but would keep this series as neutral as possible - at the end of the day, some changes have been for the ludicrous (the increasing slide of legendary pokemon into bland vaguely dragon shaped spikiness) while others have been very much for the better (pretty much everything metagame based). The main purpose of these articles is to catalogue these different changes and help start more critical conversations about these games that are obviously very important to everyone here.
