Four Pokemon Games ; From what can we conclude?

 I would consider myself a big fan of the monster taming genre. Something about the ability to choose a huge number of potential party members in an RPG format, with many of them represented by cute or cool monsters really helps. Bonus points if, as I want for all my RPGs, it's challenging or even difficult to force me to use all the systems and spread my wings inside the game. Sitting in an odd place related to this are the Pokémon games. So I decided to analyse some Pokémon games I played recently to see what conclusions I can draw from them.

Over the past month or so, I played Pokémon Moon, Crystal, Ruby and Platinum. I would say I enjoyed them all, and wanted to write up a discussion of all of their merits, shortcomings and what that can tell us about the design of a monster taming RPG.

Let's start off with Pokémon Moon. I wasn't playing on an emulator, so my images will be of a lower quality. 

Released in November 2016, Pokémon's seventh generation was a pretty large shakeup in a number of ways. Firstly, for the first ever time the gym based structure of the previous games was ditched, as well as the game having a greater emphasis on story, as well as the best graphics ever seen in a Pokémon game up to that stage. And overall, I think it's one of the best attempts at the Pokémon formula to this day. But what makes gen 7 so good? 

Pokémon is generally an exceedingly simple RPG. There's lots of numbers, calculations and other complications going on behind the scenes. But in battle, you're limited to just four possible moves, switching out, and using an item. Therefore, most of the strategy of the game has to come in the minutia of your moves and their differences, the abilities/stats/typing of your Pokémon and how that affects the battle and your decisions. It's a low decisions in battle, high impact of those individual decisions battle system. This is where I think gen 7 succeeds. By this point in the series, a lot of Pokémon have useful abilities. My endgame party of Primarina, Vikavolt, Alolan Persian, Minor, Metagross and Zygarde 10%, 5/6 of them had abilities that by knowing and understanding them I could improve my battle capacity. 

Helping with this is Pokémon's most pivotal aspect ; TMs or Technical Machines. This is the reason I found progressing in the story rapidly to be so enjoyable. I would often get a new TM (which in this generation was infinite use) and it would allow me to tangibly improve the battle capacity of many of my Pokémon. By the end every single one was carrying an interesting and diverse set of moves I'd spent the game finding, learning and generally preparing. I'd liken TMs to equipment in a more traditional RPG, but with such a genuine emphasis on moving and adjusting said equipment to prepare for various fights. If you're about to fight a dragon user, you equip your Ice Beam TM, a fairy type user your Sludge Bomb TM, etc. And this was genuinely required because honestly ; Alola's tough. Many trainers have extremely strong Pokémon and most of the major fights forced a lot of experimentation. Granted, a lot of that was due to me being under-levelled, but I still think the games' had an extra kick in terms of difficulty and level curve 

The flaw with that is one that was recently fixed in Pokémon legends Arceus, and earlier in mon inspired games like Coromon and Temtem, and that's having to go to a mid or late-game NPC to re-learn forgotten techniques, and pay a farmable resource called Heart Scales. It was incredibly frustrating and restrictive, and I hope it's going the way of the dodo in future games. 

(Before moving on, I'd briefly like to mention my favourite Pokémon from that playthrough ; Alolan Persian. Taking the good if a little bland design of Persian and giving a wider, more derpy face I think is a massive upgrade)

Through the lens of "moves as Equipment, and Freedom is good as necessitated by a strong level curve", let's go on to Pokémon Crystal which I consider to be the antithesis to this strength. Now don't get me wrong ; I think it's still a good and fun game. But, My Oh My, there were a lot of restrictions on my teambuilding. 

Let's take Victreebell as an example of what I'm talking about. Looking at It's base stats, we can see it's got both a great ATK and SPATK stat allowing it to deal high damage, leading me to train a Bellsprout for my team. 

But when we actually look at how that works in-game, there's a lot of complications. Firstly, movepool. Due to low TM availability, the strongest grass type move Bellsprout/Weepinbell can learn until level 42 (near half-way through the game) is the 35 Base Power Vine Whip, which in this generation also had a measly 10PP. The only grass type TM they can learn is Giga Drain which is restricted to the Kanto postgame. And those base stats I showed you? Almost completely inaccessible to you in-game. You see, the leaf stone needed to evolve Weepinbell into Victreebell is located.... only in the post-game (with an exception I'll come to in a second). So you'll be rocking with these base stats if you choose to use the line in your playthrough. 

The elusive leaf stone can also be found, in gen 2's flagship system the Poké-gear where NPCs you've beaten in battle will sometimes call and give you an item. Completely at random. Based on the in-game clock meaning no easy way to speed it up via an emulator. It's an arbitrary system that applies to all the stones that heavily limits your ability to actually have proper choice with your teambuilding which I consider Pokémon's strength. This is further exacerbated by the other flaws with Crystal. A lot of Pokémon just have incredibly flawed movepools. To move away from the sprouts, Let's go to Heracross, a big beefy boy who I used as a fighting and bug type to cover my weaknesses in both those categories. One problem I didn't consider before doing this: it's lack of fighting and bug type moves until high levels. *Thankfully* I discovered the surprising strength of fury cutter when used repeatedly or the game's dark types would've been a struggle.

And for all this fun optimisation I struggled and struggled to dig out of crystal, how was I rewarded? With keeping low BP moves in my toolkit to shred through the game's endless trainer fights that all go down in one hit. It was genuinely exhausting how many completely terrible trainers live in Johto. The gym fights could get fun but represented a befuddling massive level jump, and due to the lack of strategy due to limiting movepools it was genuinely difficult to get through at times. But, I did. 

The saving grace and reason I still enjoyed crystal were the gorgeous animated sprites. They're genuinely so cool and fun. 

I found Beebo My Beloved, the ONLY Pokémon in my arsenal to not incredibly suffer from the limited movepool since the only thing truly in abundance was the normal type techniques it loves. Strength, swift, slash, Thrash ; all received a meaty power bonus making Beebo one of the few pokemon on that playthrough I was genuinely overjoyed to use throughout. And when it evolved... 

I was treated to this hilarious sprite. Poor bear man, he do not know what go on, he lost, help poor bear man, poor fool. That was the most enjoyable part of my crystal playthrough. 

Moving forward, I started Pokémon Ruby, the first full colour Pokémon game. 

Ruby is where many of the series best decisions originated. Abilities give every Pokémon a unique flavour to them that can set them apart from Pokémon of a similar typing, stats or movepool. And Natures give an aspect of choosing a Pokémon's stats that's remotely in your control. You can search for a stronger physical attacker, a bulkier wall, or a faster sweeper, and the fact that they are good in that particular role is far more apparent than IVs/DVs which in-game require capturing several of the same creature to even see the stat range, or using outside tools. Not that IVs aren't still a flawed system in Pokémon to this day, but that's a separate discussion. 

Once again, I felt the aspect I enjoyed in moon ; I would go through optional dungeons, save my in-game money and generally hunt down lots of TMs that gave me an advantage in various fights. One of them was Shadow Ball from Mt. pyre, which combined with my Zangoose's Swords Dance and speed boosting nature allowed me to sweep the ghost type elite four member.

When playing ruby, I think the other aspect of designing a Pokémon game became apparent to me ; the distribution of catchable creatures and the Pokémon chosen for that game's Pokédex comes into perspective. When building a team, you try to find Pokémon that fill holes in your current lineup by their dual types or particular abilities. Hoenn suffers in this regard due to types like Ice and Fire being particularly rare (which made the decision to have an ice type elite four particularly baffling but anyway) with a massive abundance of water types. Coverage moves like Ice Beam being more widely available helped quite a bit, but I still felt it worth mentioning. 

To take a step away from the gameplay for a second, I felt the most enjoyable part of Hoenn was the general feeling of excitement the games had for you playing them. Energetic music, Vibrant and colourful towns helped a lot by the jump from GBC to GBA and the good quality overworld sprite-art. It's a very fun region to go through (especially if you don't choose a team accessible later in the game like me :P).

Finally for this discussion, I'd like to go on to Pokémon Platinum. The first main-series entry on the DS, Platinum makes the series final steps forward in terms of raw mechanics, with the next few games simply polishing the foundation it created. The UI upgrade in battles is worth mentioning first ; two screens is incredibly iconic for Pokémon and adds ergonomics and colour coordinated move icons to the Pokémon formula. And the best part is the way it iterates upon the "Moves bringing player choice" aspect I mentioned earlier. The Physical Special split. In previous games, all grass type moves were special, all fighting type moves were physical. But from Sinnoh forward, that's no longer the case. Physical Leaf Blades and special Focus blasts give underappreciated pokemon who's types didn't match their stats a chance to shine, and even for a particular statistical lean from stats or nature to allow for cool choices to be made for teambuilding. Like my Crobat. 

Why Yes, my Crobat was caught as a 1/8000 full odds shiny :3 I of course had to add it to my team. Due to it's stats giving it a higher SPATK than ATK, I pivoted it to using air cutter and sludge bomb and had a wonderful time with my unconventional lil bat. And these decisions play into TMs as equipment once again, since you can sometimes find moves of high base power  but of your unpreferred attacking type giving really interesting decision-making around replacing your level up moveset. One of the few times re-learning moves being restrictive remotely worked. 

And held items started to actually matter here! In earlier games held items provided small bonuses, but were most of the time non-essential to equip (In the time it would take you to equip your entire party with oran berries you could've just won the battle). This was the first game where I was regularly finding +20% damage to X type items, as well as being the only game to my knowledge where the incredible Choice Specs are available during the story without grinding the game's battle facilities. A really really wonderful experience and levels of choice.... until we factor in HMs.

HMs had slowly been growing as a problem since the beginning. A HM, or Hidden Machine is a move that can't be freely unlearned, but provides some benefit to your Pokémon outside of battle such as surfing on the water or cutting down overworld trees for treasure. I don't think the concept of HMs, IE in some way limiting your team's power for a chance at rare items is inherently bad as a risk reward system (ignoring the fact you can always backtrack, get a HM slave and bypass the obstacle) but when the game has 8 HMs all required or helpful to beat the game it starts to become a problem. And it would be fine if they were good moves, like the excellent Surf, Waterfall and Fly. But sprinkled in are the awful Defog, Cut, Rock Smash and Rock Climb. This lead to one of the least enjoyable victory roads in the series, and I was glad the series' attitude to HMs changed in future games since it limits the player's choice. 

Having beaten Platinum, I could then say I'd finished every Pokémon region with the exception of Galar which I plan to discuss once I can afford it.

So from this discussion, what does it mean about the design of a Pokémon game and how it can be optimised within it's bounds the best? I think it comes down to:

•  A good regional dex with great variety
• Pokemon with interesting abilities and learn-sets
• A good variety of TMs in various optional areas or in-game shops
• Held items possible to get during the campaign to promote their use
• Great UI to make the experience flow as smoothly as possible
• A decent level of challenge to make all this optimisation feel worthwhile.

Various Pokémon inspired monster catching games like Coromon, Nexomon Extinction, Temtem as well as various Pokemon rom hacks have attempted to further optimise this formula, and some of them have in my view surpassed the main series. But none have done everything quite perfectly, each failing in some aspect of this design ethos. Which is why I think bringing these aspects to light can help us analyse Pokémon Styled creature collectors to see how they can be best designed.

Thanks for reading, and that's Abbi, signing off ~