u/Groundbreaking-Ad313

Is this a hot take? I don't know.

First, let me say that I'm technically biased by the fact that not only have they literally never done raids well, but I also spent a lot of time playing raids SINGLEPLAYER, specifically in Sword and Shield, and contending with Magikarp kid and Martin's Solrock. So is it really surprising that I want raids gone forever?

But still, I think raids are just so boring. There's never any interesting strategy to employ in my experience. If you use stat changes they'll get reset. If you inflict status effects, they'll get ignored. There's usually nothing to do except for use one supereffective move and pray.

(SwSh is particularly bad because enemy max moves have secondary effects that also distrupt any other strategies you might be using, like weather.)

Then they bring out the shields, which are just stupid dumb idiot mechanics. Who likes it when raid pokemon put up shields. This just simplified the raid even further into "how many times can we hit the enemy", which is somehow still hard most of the time. And in SV specifically, the requirement to Terastalise just narrows your viable options even further. If you have a pokemon with an advantage against a raid mon, if that advantageous type isnt also its tera type then TOO BAD! You're going to have to terastalise and use THAT type if you want to break its shield!

Oh and the change to an active timer is just annoying. Not much to say there, it just IS.

And while my memories are mostly just frutstrated, from my limited experience, it seems like when you DO actually play online and have a full squad of human players, it almost always just becomes incredibly easy from everyone present having minmaxxed, powerful pokemon. Which I'll take over Martin's solrock, obviously, but it doesnt change that it's still not an interesting battle.

I've... NEVER had a truly interesting raid battle.

(despite this I spent hours doing them anyway as some sort of sick cry for help in 2020)

But I think my true contempt for Raids comes in the fact that... they're just fundamentally boring content. And they're spread across the sandbox maps as if they are content, but they're just so LAZY. They're so transparently a way to add something to do in a form that can be infinitely iterated on by just swapping the pokemon. They don't require any design whatsoever.

Although in fairness that might not be so insulting if they werent featured in the two pokemon games with the least content in the entire main series.

In fact, it's hard to put my finger on just what is so insulting about Raids to me. But if I close my eyes and picture the world of winds and waves being filled with raid battles at every step to the same degree as violet, it fills me with immense dissapointment.
I think perhaps it's because of the way they're used, being scattered around bland empty environments with little rhyme or reason. They're almost the final confession that there's nothing interesting to do in the world of SV or SWSH, and that the only way the game designers can think of for you to have fun is for you to be taken away to an isolated contextless void.
It makes it feel like you don't explore the map to reach curated and unique experiences within the open world, but that the map just acts as a plate on which to serve up interchangable boring experiences.

I think the final nail in the coffin is just that finding a pokemon in a raid, or catching one after beating the raid, is never exciting. That's never a cool way to catch a pokemon for me. The most memorable encounters with pokemon are in cool and interesting locations where you could believe the pokemon actually lives.

Like, in Platinum, I found rotom in a haunted house in the woods. In Violet, I found rotom from just some random raid. What an adventure.

Catching a pokemon because I found it in a random beam of light coming out of a clump of rocks that the game insists is meant to be some sort of "den", just feels like pokemon trying to entirely give up on the concept of the gameplay having any sort of interesting context or narrative.
Who cares where you find your pokemon or how, as long as its time-filling gameplay that fills more pages in your pokedex. Go play more raids, idiot.

After seeing the official wording of this, I now have a new interpertation of what Imu meant by this.

I believe that Imu, a powerful royal, was used to having power over almost everybody else that he encountered. To the point that he believes that holding power over others, or staying in a position of subservience within a rigid power structure, is the source of "true bliss"

Joyboy was the only one to challenge this, by being the first person who forced Imu to see him as an equal. With Joyboy, Imu genuinely enjoyed a friendship with somebody who he couldn't control or command.

However, Joyboy either actively betrayed Imu, or did something that made Imu feel betrayed. This reinforced the ideals that Imu had almost set aside: if he had been able to Dominate Joyboy, control him, the bliss of their friendship wouldn't have had to end.

Joyboy's defeat cemented this in Imu's eyes. Joyboy was the first pirate - in other words the first person in that era to find joy in defiance of the existing power structures. The previous incarnation of Freedom. Imu strove to defeat him to prove both to himself and to joyboy that he was right and joyboy was wrong, and that freedom only leads to suffering.

Hence, "isn't that right, Joyboy?"
A taunt at his enemy for his supposed failure to find True Bliss outside the structure of Dominion - but his big fat rage moment clearly shows that he hasn't fully convinced himself.
Most likely, Joyboy died laughing, and Imu is still haunted by the fact that he never truly defeated Joyboy's ideals, leaving those ideals "alive" and able to be reclaimed by a new generation.

Um. I really just intended to write a clinical explaination of what I thought the line meant but I've functionally written speculative fanfiction instead.

...What do you guys think...?

I hope they get rid of Raids