The Dark Horses of the Franchise Shouldn’t Be Ignored.
Pokémon is a franchise that both constantly adds new features, and feels like it never really does anything new. There are so many mechanics that are added to the franchise that just never show up again – Z-Moves, Dynamax, Tera Pokemon, the Seasonal Cycle, Horde Encounters. Up until recently, Mega Evolution was part of that list. But last year, Pokémon Legends Z-A was released, bringing back Mega Evolution as a mechanic and building on it. This had me thinking more and more about Pokémon’s abandoned mechanics, and how the best idea for future Pokémon games might not be to make something new, but to revisit the past.
Almost every new generation of Pokémon adds something, but the mechanics added never really stick around. You’ll see them in that game and that game only, and if you’re lucky, fans will pick them up and put them in a ROM hack or two. I think this is really part of the problem – the real reason it doesn’t look like Pokémon has changed over the years is that those changes never stick, so if you skip a generation (as many people do), then you’ll never actually see those changes. There’ll be people who have never seen Dynamax in action, and there’ll be people who didn’t even know that there was a Seasonal Cycle in the Pokémon Black and White games (Ed. note: It’s me. I am one of these people).
The Legends series is really what I want from mainline Pokémon. Not the move to real-time combat (I honestly prefer turn-based combat in mainline Pokémon. Pokémon Black and White feel like they’ve perfected the formula, and it’s never dull). It feels like a consistent evolution that you can track – Pokémon Legends: Arceus introduced the ability to sneak up on Pokémon and catch them without having to ever actually engage them in battle, something that has been carried over to Pokémon Legends Z-A. Z-A, however, also changes the way that battles work – they’re now real-time as opposed to turn-based, requiring a completely different set of skills, and it reintroduces Mega Evolution, a mechanic that hasn’t been seen since generation six, which turns battles on their head in a second. This is what I want from newer mainline Pokémon games – iteration. If you introduce a new mechanic, keep that mechanic around and implement it alongside anything new that Gamefreak decides to add.
How would this look in practice? I’m not entirely sure. Modern Pokémon games are 3D, so it’s not transferable, but ROM hacks such as Pokémon Unbound have implemented several of these mechanics in such a way that they don’t feel like they’re actively fighting against each other – Dynamax battles only happen in certain areas, for example. Maybe it’s best to keep these ideas to their own isolated Legends games, since they can be elaborated on more than putting them all together in one place. But I also think that the next Pokemon games (Generation 10) and future Generations, shouldn’t introduce new mechanics – use the smaller, lesser-known mechanics like the Seasonal Cycle and Horde Encounters in these games to really spice up the feel of the world. Seasonal Cycle allows locales to change in meaningful ways, while Horde Encounters could increase the difficulty of the games without feeling unfair. It would require balance, and probably a longer development time than the current Pokémon games enjoy, but it’d be worth it in the long-run: a game that feels new is better than doing the same thing over and over again.
Maybe I’m being naive. Maybe Gamefreak and The Pokémon Company are just going to introduce new mechanics from here until the end of time, and they’ll never really elaborate on them in the main series. But I’d like to think that the success of Pokémon Legends Z-A has shown that there is an appetite for older mechanics like Mega Evolution. There’s a real trend in the world right now in which people want to see things they remember, things they’re nostalgic for. We could argue for days as to why this is (I think the state of the world has led people to seek places where they’re more comfortable as a way to soothe themselves), but a lot of these mechanics are going to hit a point in the next five years or so where they’d be scratching that itch. So why not go back to them in a meaningful way? Why not take them and make them actually feel like they mean something, just like with Legends Z-A? Why not make a game that is centered around Dynamax Pokémon that uses the idea in a more satisfying way than Pokémon Sword? After all, I’d rather see a return to and expansion of older ideas than new ones that we’ll never see again.
Next Time: Join me in my next column as I go progressively more insane trying to play Pokémon Run & Bun, a Pokémon Emerald ROM hack created by a competitive player, as somebody who has never played Pokémon even semi-competitively.
