Is there any reason why some Pokemon in older gens had such awful learnsets...

Is there any reason why some Pokemon in older gens had such awful learnsets? It couldn't have been a balancing issue since it was so inconsistent. Take this thing for example, it learns almost no ground type moves, making it absolutely useless since Golem exists.

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I think they had this idea that elemental moves were more "special" than normal moves. OHKOing every single opponent with a super effective move was not the original plan

It learned water gun. That was big

They wanted you to have to use TMs, and have to use them carefully and strategically, but they went way too far
Nowadays they've overshot in the opposite direction

Some of them got a very generous variety of elemental moves though. Alakazam gets confusion, psybeam and psychic through level up, the last one at level 38. He also gets all three elemental punches as an abra. Meanwhile Xatu gets nothing but psychic, and only at level 65. It feels like half of the pokemon had conflicting design philosophies.

Pretty much as said - Early Pokemon games were balanced more like oldschool jrpgs and GF was more concerned with flavour than making things good. It's an Elephant/Tire hybrid, it could hit things, roll around and eventuuuuaaally learn to make Earthquakes. Also with how Gen 2 game mechanics worked you did not really needed to be concerned with which Pokemon was stronger - between stat experience, badge boosts etc. practically everything was viable.

The early design mentality was "normal moves for general use, elemental for special cases, TMs fill the gaps" donphan was basically designed visually around rollout, not sure why he's ground. I mainly follow this mentality when I play modern games, I would rather a battle be fun than have perfect coverage and sweep every trainer I meet.

Also, simply to put - for some reasons GF decided to make bunch of rarer Pokemon difficult to use. Honestly i would like to know what's the idea behind this decision.
Also with Donphan specifically - unless you visit specific early game location at very specific time you'll get one practically at the end of the game so most of its level up moves are irrelevant.

Abra being a bitch to catch due to Teleport and useless until it evolved unless you used TMs was meant to offset how broken its evolutions were. Basically another Magikarp/Gyarados situation.

>Honestly i would like to know what's the idea behind this decision.
Battling and collecting were seen as two opposing goals. Battlers wouldn't waste time on catching them all when they could train their team to be the very best, and collectors would care more about owning rare Pokemon than how they fare in battle.

I don't mind the idea of the best moves being TM-only but I agree that movesets prior to gen 6 are shit.

>prior to gen 6
Gen 3 was a massive improvement though

STAB moves were meant to be a serious advantage. The entire reason the starters were worthwhile was because every one of them learned good STAB moves, seriously that was their designed advantage. A typed move that could be SE with STAB was meant to be a major advantage. Also, you don't have to trade for Donphan so it's got that over Golem, and it does learn Earthquake by level and bt TM, you can even breed Water Gun onto it which was incredible back then.

Voltorb got not a single electric move, nor the attack stat to use his signature move. Poor guy, I guess he was nothing but a Flash slave after all

>DS zoomie mad about having to actually think instead of spamming 120-130BP STABs for free

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I'm not a zoomer, I'm revisiting the games I used to play as a kid. You could definitely still spam STABs for free, just not with some random select pokemon for whatever reason. Geodude learns rock throw at level 11, magnetude at 16 and Dig through TM. It just seems strange to me how some pokemon are basically handicapped into being useless by having no viable moves.

> just seems strange to me how some pokemon are basically handicapped into being useless by having no viable moves.
Game Freak has always hates certain Pokémon, it’s just gotten worse in the later gens because now there are mor mechanics and better moves to give to thei favorites while making the ones they hate even worse in comparison

>using the same 4 moves for the entire game is "thinking"

You teach them TMs.

I also think Gen II had a serious scarcity of TMs when compared to Gen I, other than the 3 elemental punches you can buy in Goldenrod. In RBY the game practically throws TMs at the player so it's never an issue.

STAB was too OP

>people defending this shit ITT
take note zoomers, this is the old "based golden age" of pokemon people will talk down to you over. bad game design is "soul."

>bad game design is "soul."
But that's what zoomers are saying about the new games? You're always praising lack of story, lack of battles, lack of postgame, easy as fuck npcs, overabundance of exp and the simplification of breeding and EV training. Game design is objectively the worst it has ever been in SwSh and yet here you are whining about the games that were actually good. Classic fox and grapes

I'm a zoomer and I just played Crystal for the first time a few months ago. I had a lot of fun with it and one of the things I specifically liked was how barren the learnsets for Pokémon were. It made it really feel like you had to train your Pokémon to get better, put emphasis on good TMs, and you slowly saw an increase in their power over the course of the game. I didn't realize how destructive to progression getting a 60-80 power stab move at level 10 was until playing Crystal. It's unironically great design.

>lack of story
Lack of story is exactly what makes gen 2 great and too much story is exactly what makes nu-Pokémon shit. Wtf are you talking about?

Gen 2 doesn't have a lack of story, it has a good story, unlike anything we've had in the last decade that either forces too much or has nothing