Last entry in this series, so let’s hope it’s a good one.  I’m going to be dealing primarily with battle mechanics here, so odds are good everything I say here is going to be superseded completely the moment X and Y are released in a couple of weeks (hell, for all I know, some of it has been already, since I deliberately pay very little attention to pre-release material), but that’s not going to stop me.  Here we go!

Earlier in this series I talked about my notion that Pokémon is actually two different games http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/56511544854/if-i-were-in-charge-i-will-battle-every-day-to-claim – a single-player one defined by the game developers, and a multiplayer one defined by the community.  Here I want to talk about one of the big differences between the two that has a nasty habit of bringing about all kinds of plainly unnecessary spite and ill feeling – whether or not Pokémon are any ‘good’ competitively.  Talking about game balance in Pokémon is unavoidably problematic because it seems likely that, early on, Game Freak never really cared whether the games were ‘balanced’ at all, and possible that they still don’t even now.  This then must lead us to question whether game balance is even inherently desirable.  My instinct is ‘obviously it is.’  It is a well-established point of the series’ philosophy, expressed consistently by a variety of positively-portrayed characters throughout its incarnations, that any Pokémon can shine and become a powerhouse with the right kind of love and dedication.  As a child, my favourite expression of the sentiment was always Karen’s: “Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favourites.”  Read carefully into what she’s saying, though: she’s not denying that some Pokémon are strong and others weak; she’s saying that whether this actually matters is a question of perspective.  We only care about whether Pokémon are weak or strong because we use them to battle (unfortunately, battling is difficult to avoid).  Taken this way, her comment that “truly skilled trainers try to win with their favourites” could be seen as an exhortation to pick weak Pokémon on purpose for the challenge of it – and, indeed, in the single-player game this can be a worthwhile and fulfilling pursuit.  It’s only when we come up against the single-player/competitive dichotomy that Karen’s rhetoric starts to become painfully obstructive.  If your favourite Pokémon happens to be Ledian, Mawile, or Seaking, you should probably get used to ignoring her.  This doesn’t seem fair to me.  Why punish people for liking Ledian while rewarding people for liking Dragonite?

Damn, this one was hard to write…

Who among us has never once felt a little cheated by our inability to respond “yes” to the Team Rocket recruiter’s offer in Cerulean City on Red and Blue?  One of the more persistent demands fans make of Pokémon is the possibility of being able to ‘swap sides’ as it were – play for the bad guys once in a while.  Many RPGs allow this; some even focus on it, so it’s hardly without precedent, but Pokémon games do not do this.  Even outside the core series, there are (to my knowledge) no games where playing as a villain is an option.  Surely this is somewhere that offers a lot of potential for future developments?

Well, yes and no.  The fact is, I think that Game Freak’s reticence to explore those paths is, in many ways, entirely justified.  So before talking about how I’d do this, let’s first think about whether I even would.

Right.  I’m in America.  I have an apartment.  With a bed.   And food.  Good.  I have just over a month until X and Y are released, promptly making this entire series quite obsolete, and three planned articles left.  That seems like a perfectly reasonable timeline.  On with the show!

Now, where was I?

Red and Blue.  Gold and Silver.  Ruby and Sapphire.  Diamond and Pearl.  Black and White.  Pokémon games, as a matter of tradition, come in pairs.  The games’ storylines are broadly very similar; the essential difference is in the Pokémon that are available in each one – generally, each game will have perhaps five or six Pokémon of the current generation that are missing from the other.  The obvious purpose is to encourage trading; it’s impossible to complete the Pokédex on a single game, so one must enlist the help of friends (this is, of course, the intention; for the purposes of this discussion we will leave firmly aside the stereotype of the lonely Pokémon trainer who buys two consoles and both versions to trade with him or herself).  These days, with so many legacy Pokémon scattered across so many different games, one questions whether this is actually necessary; it is almost impossible by this point to complete the entire national Pokédex even with three or four different games at one’s disposal (the handful of deliberately omitted Pokémon seeming but a minor speed bump in comparison) completing the regional Pokédex only requires one to see all of the local species anyway, plenty of Pokémon still need to be traded to evolve, and there are no shortage of other multiplayer functions to reward playing with friends, which will doubtless continue to proliferate.  I would go so far as to suggest that the concept of paired games, as originally intended, is obsolete.  However, the games have been evolving.  Pairs of Pokémon games aren’t just about trading so you can get a Bellsprout anymore – the tradition of pairing has almost become a part of the medium, something that later games have been using to make a point.  Can this concept continue to be relevant and beneficial even when its original purpose has become almost meaningless?