Here’s the video, for the benefit of other readers. It does a good job of explaining some tricky concepts; it’s worth watching.
So… the thing with Pokémon. The thing with Pokémon is that Game Freak’s idea of balancing it – as far as I can tell – is just to shake things up regularly, to the point that a stable metagame never forms in the first place. New Pokémon, new TMs, new move tutors or new forms of existing Pokémon turn up practically every year, while older Pokémon don’t actually get banned or anything but may become more difficult to get hold of as the games to which they are native get older; meanwhile there are several different formats like doubles, so that a Pokémon which is useless in one is actually quite good in another, and then official tournaments will often do things like restrict players to one generation, which mixes things up a great deal. When they do formally ban things, there’s almost no rhyme or reason to it; they ban a Pokémon based on its status as a ‘high-tier’ legendary, not based on how good it is (probably because they don’t actually know) – stuff like Mega Kangaskhan would never be banned despite being ridiculous; stuff like Zygarde would never be allowed despite being mediocre. The end result is that there are a whole lot of different contexts in which one can play Pokémon, and it’s almost certain that none of them are actually ‘balanced’ in themselves, but there are so damn many of them that it doesn’t actually matter, and none of those contexts lasts more than a year or so before the next random shake-up anyway. Meanwhile you have a sort of power creep happening because Game Freak only ever give new stuff to Pokémon – they almost never take it away, which means that a Pokémon who, through no fault of its own, doesn’t get something shiny and amazing in every generation steadily falls behind as other stuff gets stronger. The situation of ‘perfect imbalance’ described in the video is a lot more like what Smogon tries to achieve with their tier system, where a Pokémon can rise or fall within the system as people discover ways of using it or countering it. However, because Smogon doesn’t actually control the game and can’t issue patches or make balance tweaks, they can’t build the kind of carefully calibrated imbalances that the video talks about – the can only pick things to ban or unban from different levels, which is haphazard at best. Moreover, because so many people just don’t fully understand what the hell they’re trying to do, it earns them as much scorn as praise.
And then Game Freak tops it all off with whipped cream and a cherry by tossing in Mega Rayquaza, a Pokémon so ridiculously overpowered that even the other ridiculously overpowered Pokémon can’t deal with the damn thing.
To be honest, I gave up caring at that point; I think Mega Rayquaza was the straw that broke the Numel’s back. Pokémon as Game Freak and Nintendo run it is just not a serious competitive game and never will be, and that sort of doesn’t matter because it’s not trying to be, not really. Perhaps as many as two thirds of the Pokémon in the game are just objectively worse than other Pokémon that do basically the same thing, and a lot of the skill involved in the game is in team construction, so ultimately the big hurdle is in figuring out which Pokémon are ‘good’ and which ones are ‘bad,’ but that whole process is counterintuitive to a lot of players because the game encourages attachment to individual Pokémon. Ultimately, I’m starting to think it’s better just to go with it – do stupid stuff, like play a single-type team, or take your playthrough team to a tournament, or actually use Corsola. Do Nuzlockes. Play with other people who like doing stupid stuff. If you want a game that’s actually balanced, there’s always online simulators and Smogon rules.
Pokémaniacal 