Dexterity, Pokémon Games, and Me

With the multitude of Pokémon games today, each one offers something different for the player to enjoy. Each one also requires skills that other games may not have. One of them is dexterity, which is present in quite a few non-main series Pokémon games. It's a neat skill to be implemented and to execute, but it's also something I have some problems with, sometimes no matter how many times I try to accomplish things in the games. There are (or were) a few such happenings for a few Pokémon games in my case, especially strong cases.

Shuffle is the current Pokémon game I play that involves a lot of dexterity. Expert and many Special Stages in the game require to be played under a time limit, which means dexterity is necessitated as a lot of things happen all at once in those stages. My problem is that sometimes I attempt stages and miss a few things here and there, enough to even not complete the stage within the allotted time limit. It's no surprise - the obstacles in the playing field and sometimes other Pokémon than the ones in my party appear in order to trip up even the best of players, and they require dexterity in the timed stages to get past. In my case the problem seems more aggravated.

An older example would have to be PokéPark, for both of its iterations. I've mentioned one difficulty I had with the first iteration last year, which happened to take up more time than it should have; it could be said that it almost made me unable to finish the game. Another difficulty occurred in the second iteration, where I got to a particular minigame that required positioning the Wiimote in certain ways to earn a good score and advance; understandably, this one took many tries as well before the game satisfactorily let me advance. The dexterity required for these aren't necessarily fast, but they did cause some problems nonetheless.

Though I have not been able to play it much, Pokkén is one other game that I did experience dexterity problems. As I've mentioned in my first discussion about this game, at the one time this game was exhibited, I did play it, and lost almost miserably. I had seemed to do well at the beginning, but then I sunk rather quickly. Pokkén is a true fighting game, unlike the main series games, so the dexterity that applies with fighting games would also apply here. I've seen this game's fighting brethren - Tekken - in action many times due to a popular exhibitor, and I'm sure much of the dexterity that applies to that game would help here.

I'm a Pokémon gamer, but I'm not a particularly dexterous one. These are just some of the issues that I personally have with certain Pokémon games. Given the breadth of Pokémon games, it is almost assured that new games requiring dexterity will appear; it's just something that I will have to prepare for. In the meantime, I can still try to play the existing games that take a good bit of dexterity and work with or around my issues in them.

One year ago: Team Harmony