Old Man Yells at Clouds - Pokemon Day/Night Cycles

I like games that track time. It was great in Breath of Fire 2 for example. The shifting between night and day gave the world a more lively feel, as what goes on in a town changes. It made for a good tool to make the world feel a bit more realistic.

Harvest Moon is another great example, forcing you to carefully manage your activities to get the most out of each passing day, as you only have a limited amount of time to do anything.

And there is Pokemon. Oh dear god there is Pokemon. This is an aspect of this game that needs to die a slow and painful death. See, what differentiates Pokemon from other day/night cycles is that this game tracks the time it is in real life. So it’s 5 PM in the real world? It’s 5 PM in Pokemon.

Now, why is this a bad thing? Well without cheating your system and just changing the time, something that is just tedious busy work, best hope your schedule just so happens to match up well with what you want to get done in the game. Cause some Pokemon are only available at certain times of the day. So you have your day off, and maybe it’s, I don’t know, three days away. And the days you work conflict with the times you can catch the Pokemon you are after. So now you are stuck waiting three days before you have a good chance to actually accomplish this.

Worse yet, when it keeps track of the day of the week. Oh, this person only appears Tuesday? And you work? Better hope something important doesn’t come up or you let it slip your mind, cause in either of those cases bam! You get to wait another week.

Apply all of this to evolving Pokemon as well as catching them, as some Evolutions in certain games only happen if you evolve them during the right time of day.

Without cheating the system, Pokemon does more than any other non-MMO game to dictate when you should be playing it. You can’t just pick up and go whenever and get that Murkrow or whatever, cause you can’t catch that during the day. Do you want Murkrow? You’d better load up that game when Pokemon says you should load up that game.

It would be so much nicer if the game just had an internal clock that, after so many actions/steps or time played the time progresses at a faster rate than in real life. Harvest Moon, for example, is one second in real time is one minute in game time (About that, probably not an exact number). Just… do this in Pokemon. You get the nice day and night vibe, without the hassle of having to cheat the system to just sit down and get your damn Murkrow.

Tying the time in the game to real life adds nothing to the immersion or mechanics of the game, and only serves to frustrate people who aren’t on a convenient schedule to match up with what they want to do in the game.