Grass… kinda gets a raw deal, yeah.  Just purely in terms of the number of other types it’s strong/weak against, it’s one of the games’ worst… which is kind of a sore spot for me, since it’s also my favourite.  Most types are defensively vulnerable to two or three others; a few are vulnerable to only one, and Ice (which also kinda got shafted, I think mainly because Generations 1 and 2 had no pure Ice-types) is vulnerable to four.  Grass is vulnerable to five: Flying, Ice, Fire, Bug and Poison.  Only one other type has that many defensive weaknesses – ironically, that would be Rock (vulnerable to Fighting, Steel, Ground, Grass and Water).  Rock, though, gets to enjoy being one of the game’s better offensive types – Rock is the only type other than Ground to be strong against a greater number of types than it is weak against, offensively.  Grass, not so much – Grass attacks are weak against seven different types (Grass, Flying, Bug, Fire, Dragon, Poison and Steel), which until X and Y was more than any other – and that changed not because Grass’s situation improved, but because the next-worst-off type, Bug, gained a new disadvantage against Fairy-types.  They’re strong against three (Rock, Ground and Water), which is sort of average, really.

Grass does, admittedly, have a decent number of resistances – four of them (Water, Electric, Ground and Grass itself), while many types only have two or three, but it doesn’t really stand out in that regard – Water, Rock and Dragon also have four, as do Ghost, Fairy and Flying if you count their immunities (which, y’know, are kind of better), Poison has five, Fire has six, and Steel blows them all out of the water with eleven.  It has to be said that counting types can only go so far – Dragon, for instance, was hands-down the best attacking type of the fourth and fifth generations, despite being strong against only one type (itself), because it had nearly perfect neutral coverage, resisted only by Steel.  The problem, though, is that where types like Dragon and Rock lose out in one respect but do very well in another, Grass kinda loses everywhere.  Grass-types are, admittedly, also immune to Leech Seed and, as of X and Y, powder attacks (the important ones being Stun Spore, Sleep Powder and Spore) – so basically they’re really good at blocking other Grass-types.  That seems to be the niche Game Freak has in mind for them here.  I mean… not that those immunities aren’t useful, but they’re also kind of a slap in the face.

So, when I put it like that, it seems like the obvious thing to do is strip out some of those damned weaknesses (the attacks, I think, are fine as they are – Solarbeam could maybe use some work, because at the moment it’s kind of a gimmick and only viable on dedicated sun-abuse teams, but I’m not sure how to change it).  Let’s start with Flying.  Why does Flying beat Grass?  I’ve seen element-based systems before where Plant/Forest is actually strong against Wind/Sky, birds can help plants through pollination (analogy with the Grass-Water relationship), and it’s scientific fact that plants bolster hillsides against erosion by the wind.  I say make Grass-types resist Flying attacks, and Grass attacks neutral to Flying-types.  Make Flying-types strong against Water instead; the smug pricks deserve it.  We can probably get away with removing Steel’s resistance to Grass too, since Steel has too many damn resistances anyway.  In flavour terms that’s not as solid, because there’s precedent for Metal-beats-Wood in the Chinese Wu Xing cycles, but the fact is, there are probably ways to justify having Steel resist everything, so I think a little more restraint is in order when dealing with that type.  Those things won’t make Grass an amazing type, but it’ll certainly make it not suck!

Bug could use some help too, but I’ve been babbling long enough…

Flying is weird, because it seems like it can consist of either being a bird or having the ability to fly – not necessarily both (see: Dodrio, Scyther).  In addition to the fact that there’s only one straight Flying-type (and even that in generation five), it might also be important that Flying is almost never the first of two types; there’s no functional distinction at all, but which element gets put first often seems to say something about which one is considered more important to the design (e.g. Water/Rock – Relicanth and Corsola – vs. Rock/Water – Kabutops and Omastar).  Noibat and Noivern, only just introduced with X and Y, are the only Pokémon to put Flying first.  What’s more, wind powers – which we now associate with Flying-types, and which are Tornadus’ main feature – originally seem to have been connected with Normal, not Flying, because Gust was a Normal-type attack in Red and Blue, while Whirlwind and Razor Wind, the other wind attacks that existed in the original game, still are Normal.  I think what all this adds up to is that Flying wasn’t originally considered a type, as such – it acts more like a trait or ability that certain Pokémon possess, which makes sense when you think about it, because that’s what flight is (Dodrio is explained by the fact that, as we know from Missingno., the type was originally called “Bird,” not “Flying”).  Tornadus shows that Game Freak’s conception of what the type means has changed significantly since Pokémon began, but some things about this game resist change.  Charizard, then, isn’t so much “a Fire/Flying-type” as “a Fire-type who can fly,” while Pidgeot – and this is important when we move into the next half of your question – isn’t “a Normal/Flying-type,” but “a Normal-type who can fly.”

Now, Normal-types.  They rely primarily on attacks of pure bodily strength, but without the complex motions and training that allow Fighting-types to overpower them hand-to-hand.  As such, they also find it difficult to harm the rigid, reinforced hides of Rock- and Steel-types, and cannot inflict any harm at all on the insubstantial Ghost-types.  However, being more aware than most Pokémon of the limitations of physical reality also makes them distant from the world of ghosts and spirits, rendering them invulnerable to harm from that direction.  So, what do I think are the defining attributes of the Normal-type?

None.  It doesn’t have any.

Normal is the “everything else” type, where we find Pokémon who have powers that either relate to none of the other elements (like Pigeotto’s wind powers, Jigglypuff’s song, or Chansey’s healing abilities), or that encompass all of them (like Ditto’s transformation skill).  This becomes difficult when we confront dual-typed Normal Pokémon… but other than Normal/Flying-types, whom we’ve discussed already, how many of those are there in the first three generations?  I count only Girafarig, who is something of a special case because his design focuses on his bifurcated nature; his front half has the more cerebral temperament associated with Psychic-types, while his back half is animalistic and has no special powers.  It’s not until Bibarel in generation four, then Sawsbuck and Meloetta in five, that this really starts to change, and only now, with the introduction of Diggersby, Heliolisk and Pyroar, and the retyping of Jigglypuff, that non-Flying Normal dual-types have become a significant element of Pokémon’s diversity.  What this says about those Pokémon, I think, is that their elemental powers are comparatively less developed than in the case of other Ground-, Electric-, Fire- or Fairy-types, and that they rely as much or more on their non-elemental abilities (sound-related powers are still unaligned, for instance – hence Jigglypuff, Meloetta and Pyroar, who has a sound-based signature move, Noble Roar).  It was difficult to give Normal-types abilities related to types other than Flying for a long time because the thing that made them Normal-types was their lack of any such abilities.  It’s only fairly recently that they’ve been able to reconcile this with their desire to use a greater variety of Normal dual-types.

I don’t think so, no.  I like that they’re ‘commodities,’ that there’s a cost to those evolutions.  Making the items reusable would render them disappointingly trivial, I think – unless you also made them much harder to get and really emphasised the tremendous value such an object would have.

Is it?

I assume you’re referring to their reluctance to introduce new evolutions for old Pokémon with existing evolution methods, presumably in order to provide consistent explanations for why those Pokémon hadn’t been available before (i.e. if Eevee could be evolved with a Leaf Stone, Leafeon should have been obtainable in Red and Blue).  The reason I find this so odd, though, is that there are lots of other changes which apparently aren’t ‘big issues’ at all – things like which moves a Pokémon learns as it levels, or Magnemite’s type, or the minor adjustments to their base stats received by many Pokémon in X and Y.  Heck, you could even argue they’ve retconned an evolution method by what they did with Feebas and Milotic.  I think the reason this particular aspect is so privileged is probably because obtaining Pokémon is a central objective of the game – they’re not so much interested in providing a reason why we couldn’t get Leafeon (or whatever); they’re interested in providing a reason why Professor Oak didn’t require us to.  That’s just a guess, though.

Well, in terms of rebalancing, not much, at the moment.  I still haven’t digested the impact of the changes Game Freak made in X and Y, so I don’t know what needs changing.

If we’re talking about sweeping thematic changes… well, there would probably be two or three fewer types, one way or another.  I’d either eliminate Ground or merge it with Rock, call it Earth or something, because really earthquakes have everything to do with rocks and not much to do with soil, and no-one seems to know whether sand powers fall under Ground or Rock, and honestly it all seems a bit arbitrary at times.  Maybe shuffle some of them over into Fighting instead while we’re at it.  I don’t much like the idea of Normal as a ‘miscellaneous’ type, either, and I sort of think that with Fairy in the mix now you could probably do without it; just toss everything into Dark, Fighting, Ground (or Earth or whatever we’re calling it now) or Fairy.   All the birds can be straight Flying, Kangaskhan can be Earth/Fighting, Porygon can be Steel/Fairy, Exploud might have to be Earth/Fairy or something, and Kecleon can be whatever he damn well pleases; you get the idea.  Sort some of the Normal attacks into types, and declare anything left over ‘typeless’ – resisted by nothing, strong against nothing, and no-one gets STAB on them.

Don’t be sorry; I live for you (you, plural – not you personally; don’t take this the wrong way, since I’m sure you’re a lovely person, but we haven’t met or even battled yet and how are you supposed to win over my heart if you haven’t won over my trusty team of sla- er, Pokémon friends?).

Anyway.

The thing about contests is that they’re a side show.  They make for a neat mini-game, and they’re a cool way for Pokémon who aren’t so good at battles to take the spotlight (of course, Pokémon who are also good at battles can kick ass and take names in contests as well, but at least the playing field is more level).  They also emphasise one of the points that the franchise likes to make but spends little time on – partnerships between people and Pokémon take many and diverse forms.  The trouble is that the game doesn’t really give you any reason to take part in contests.  There’s no story, and there are no rewards (no, ribbons are not a reward).  Give contests a storyline, so that I have a reason to care about making my Pokémon pretty, and I’ll jump right back in!  Otherwise… meh?

On Water/Poison, I agree that it would make at least as much thematic sense as any of the other type matchups in Pokémon, and if you had asked me this a year ago I would have said yes without a second’s thought because Poison-types needed more love (I think I may actually have suggested this change myself at one point).  Today, though… well, Poison has already gotten a boost from being strong against Fairy.  Likewise for Electric/Steel, it would have made sense, but Steel’s just been nerfed by losing its resistances to Dark and Ghost attacks, while Electric-types have just been given immunity to all forms of paralysis.  I’m not prepared to say that these are bad ideas by any stretch of the imagination, but I want to let the new changes settle and rethink my priorities here before I start commenting on more adjustments.

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.  I know that Flamethrower and Fire Blast have both been reduced in power slightly in X and Y, and I’m not sure how people are reacting to that, but in the older generations people didn’t consider Flamethrower “entirely superior” at all.  The way it’s generally seen is that by multiplying power by accuracy you can get an estimate of the amount of damage a move will do on average, and if the less accurate move is still stronger, it’s worth it.  Using the 5th generation  numbers, you’ll usually do more damage with Fire Blast: 95 x 100% = 95 for Flamethrower, but 120 x 85% = 102, which is a bit higher (contrast Thunderbolt/Thunder, where Thunder’s much lower 70% accuracy means that, on average, you’ll do more damage with Thunderbolt unless you have rain support – 120 x 70% = 84).  The 6th generation numbers give a similar kind of result.  The reliability of the 100%-accurate moves can be attractive, but more powerful moves also have a better chance to one-shot an opponent, which can be extremely important (and, of course, there are a couple of Pokemon who can learn Flamethrower but not Fire Blast, like Electivire and Zoroark, but they’re kind of a minority).  It’s also much easier to run out of PP when using Fire Blast, especially against opponents with Pressure.  As a result, Fire Blast is generally preferred, but there’s room for personal taste.  Honestly, I’m totally okay with this balance.

The values you suggest give us 60 x 100% = 60 for Flame Burst, 90 x 85% = 76.5 for Flamethrower, and 110 x 70% = 77 for Fire Blast.  Flame Burst is still so much lower that it’s not really worth it, while Flamethrower and Fire Blast get values that are much closer together, so it’s harder to pick a clear winner, but people would probably still use both.  I think making the ‘reliable’ option so much weaker would just make things much more frustrating, to be honest.

Better?

It would be different, and it would be more complicated.  I mean, ultimately, a lot of the things you’re suggesting would be the beginnings of giving every individual Pokémon a basic AI – which… you know… would not be easy; I mean, I’m no programmer, but some people have hundreds of the bloody things running round on one game.  If Pokémon decide that they want to be released completely at random, it’d just be annoying; there needs to be some kind of actual decision-making framework in there.  Similarly, Pokémon popping out of nowhere at random and joining you for no reason doesn’t add anything.  You need a system where individual Pokémon can react to stimuli in different ways and let past experiences influence their future actions, which would be kinda complicated.  Having to manage the personalities of six different Pokémon would also make it a very different kind of game.  There’s probably some middle ground in there between “Byzantine” and “pointless,” but I think it’d be tremendously easy to get stuff like this very wrong.  I’m okay with continuing to take this kind of thing slowly.