As I have said earlier, there are two main parts of Pokémon, playing through the games, and competitive battle. Playing through the games can be fun for a beginner, and even for the advanced player every once in a while, but the competitive battling aspect is what I am more interested in, as it is more complex and has more overall content. For the sake of informing, I will go over the basics of both.
Playing through:
Pokémon games are divided into Regions where they are further divided into two games witch each have certain Pokémon that can be found in one game but not the other. Some Regions are remade and some have a third game released after the first pair. There are five regions this far, this translates to 10 games plus all of the extra games. There is a third game out for the first 4 regions, which brings the total to 14 main games. There are also 4 remakes of various games bringing the total to 18. But there are multiple spin-off series games, such as Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, Pokémon Colosseum, and Pokémon Trozei. I'm not going to go to in depth into the spin-off games, because there are many of them and I have played on a couple of them.
I mentioned that there are five regions early. These regions each have their own map and set of Pokémon. Some of the Pokémon overlap/are available in more than one region. Note, there is no overlap between 5th gen(another word for regions) Pokémon and any other region. The regions are Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, and Unova. The most recently released region is Unova, the released games from Unova are Pokémon Black and Pokémon White. There is a total of 648 Pokémon since the release of Black and White.
By now you're probably wondering what is Pokémon? Well, I'm finally going to explain what you actually do in the games. So in the original games, Red and Blue, you started off in your room, and you could go downstairs and leave the house. You could wonder around the city all you wanted, but it wouldn't be until you tried to walk into grass that the Pokémon Professor would try and stop you. He would then proceed to bring you to his lab and let you pick from three Pokémon. The options were Charmander (the fire type), Bulbasaur (the grass type), and Squirtle (the water type). These were very rare Pokémon and could not find them in the wild anywhere else, so this decision laid out the base plan for the rest of your game.
If you chose Charmander that meant that you wanted a challenge or you liked dragons (Charmanders final evolution is freaking awesome and looks a lot like a dragon). I say agressive because the first two gym battles, or boss fights (there are a total of eight in each region), the leader had a big advantage against you due to their typing. At that point in the game, you wouldn't have much time to catch a Pokémon that would be strong against Rock or Water, the types of the first two gyms respectively.
If you sided with picking Bulbasaur, you were probably looking for an easy game, as Bulbasaur has a big advantage against the first three gyms and is neutral with the fourth. Bulbasaur and its final evolution, Venasaur, are pretty defensive Pokémon and can't deal out as big of hits as Charizard, for example, can. That doesn't mean that you can't OHKO(one hit knock out) all of your opponents, but it is something to keep in mind.
Finally there is Squirtle. Squirtle is the middle man, he easily takes care of the first gym, but you cannot rely on him for the second and especially not the third, fourth, and some latter gyms. He can deal out a lot of damage, but he can also take some hits. He is probably the second best for trying to have the easiest possible game, but you can also still have a challenge if you pick him.
After you decide on your starter, you then get challenged by a kid that you decided the name for at the beginning of the game. This is your first battle! It is pretty easy to win if you just keep using tackle, pound, scratch, or whatever attacking move your Pokémon knows. You later get Pokéballs for catching addditional team members, and then you can go on the defeat all eight gyms and eventually the Pokémon League (aka the elite 4).
All of the games from the main series have similar plot lines, except for there are various antagonists that you have to deal with throughout the games, they are the only thing that prevents you from just sailing through the games in under an hour. Also there are other various challenge that you have to conquer to complete the game.
I think that I have explained the games well enough at this point, so I'm going to now tell you about something called a Nuzlocke challenge. These are very difficult and are not for n00bs. What a nuzlocke challenge is is adding on to your game that you can only catch the first Pokémon on every area of the map that you encounter and that once a Pokémon feints (its HP goes to 0 in battle or out of battle) you can no longer use that Pokémon and must release it or place it in your PC.
I'm sorry that I did not explain many of the basic mechanics such as moves, levels and types in this blog, I will go in depth on them in the future.
Competitive Play:
For this I will assume that you have at least a basic grasp on how Pokémon works. Competitive play is much more advanced than just playing through the regular games. First off all, except for a few exceptions, of the Pokémon used in this are at Level 100, which would require a lot of work to get legitimately. So people invent software to and hardware that allows you to edit your game and add Pokémon to your boxes and party, this saves a lot of time. Don't worry, people still use Pokémon that they could obtain through normal game play, they just save a TON of time by editing their game.
Another way people save even more time is through creating applications dedicated to Pokémon battles. The most popular application at the moment is called Pokémon-Online or P.O. It allows players to create their own teams with a very easy to use interface and it allows them to do it without the standard hassle required with the actual cartridges. For the purpose of this guide, I will only talk as if you were using P.O. and battling in the 5th generation.
There are a few mechanics of the game that I would like to point out: IVs, EVs, Moves, damage, move order, type, weather, nature, ability, and type. I wil give you a brief explanation of each.
Stats - Each Pokémon has 6 stats: speed, attack, special attack, hit points (or hp), defense and special defense. The stats each are an integer value between 1 and 999, it is impossible to get to this stat without stat boosters, I will explain those later. Stats are calculated based on the Pokémon's level, base stat, IV, EVs, and nature.
IVs - IV stands for individual values. Each Pokémon has one for all of their stats (attack, defense, etc.) they are an integer value ranging from 0 to 31. They effect the stat in a way that the higher the IV the higher the stat. I will not go into too much detail about the odds of each IV on each stat and the formulas for calculating how much it effects the stat.
EVs - EV stands for effort values. Each Pokémon can have a total of 510 EVs and a max of 252 in one stat. You gain EVs from defeating Pokémon with higher stats in a specific area, like you would get 3 in Special Attack from defeating an Alakazam. The stat goes up by 1 for every 4 EVs. Most people have a split of 252 in one stat 252 in another and 4 in another, the extra two are useless.
Nature - Natures are a varyable that either gives the Pokémon plus 10% in stat and minus 10% in a different stat or they can have a neutral nature that doesn't affect them at all. There is a nature that adds to every stat and subtracts from every stat and some various neutral natures. Here is a chart that explains it very well Serebii Natures
Moves - This is one of the most complicated and simple areas of competitive battling. Simple because it is simple to see that you select one of four moves and there isn't much math involved in doing that, but complex because there are hundreds of moves to pick from, and you only get to put 4 on your Pokémon, this creates huge numbers of combinations that you can pick from. To know which moves to put on your Pokémon, you should first know which type of Pokémon you want. By this I'm referring to five basic types of Pokémon.
Sweepers are the first one. Sweepers are very offensive Pokémon that are meant to tear apart the enemies team. They generally have very high speed and either physical or special attack. This brings me to my next point, sweepers are divided into three categories: mixed, physical, and special. Physical use physical attacks, special use special attacks, and mixed use both physical and special attacks.
Walls are up next. Walls are Pokémon designed for taking hits against the opponent. They have high hp and/or special/physical defense. Walls also generally need a way of recovering their hp. There are various moves for doing just that such as: wish, recover, etc. Every team needs at least one physical and one special wall, to handle both physical and special sweepers.
Tanks are the third category. Tanks are Pokémon that can both take hits and deal damage. Tanks are not a necessary staple for a team, but they can be nice to have. They generally have some high hp and moderate attack and defenses. They can be used to take hits from sweepers that are both physical and defensive then destroy them do to their extrem fragile nature.
Spinners and setups are the fourth basic group of Pokémon. setups are used to set up entry hazards such as spikes, toxic spikes and stealth rocks. Spinners are used to spin away theses entry hazards. Having a spinner is something that can be extremely important, to not take perpetual damage on switches and potentially getting all of your Pokémon poisoned. Also having a setup can help you destroy your opponents team if they don't have a spinner.
Finally we have leads. There are many different kinds of leads, that all have their advantages. I'm not going to go into too much detail about lead in this post.
So now that you know some of the types of Pokémon that you need on your team, you know that you need certain types of moves for them. Like how you will generally have offensive moves on your sweepers and tanks. And that you will have status inducing moves on your walls and sometimes tanks. And that you will have setting up moves on your setups.
Weather - There are types of weather: hail, rain, sandstorm, and sunny day. There are two ways to induce weather. There are moves that do it for five turns (or 8 depending on weather or not you are holding a certain item) and abilities that make weather permanent. Also certain moves are boosted in weather, like fire in sunny day. There are many perks to the various weather things and I will go into more detail in a later post.
Damage - The damage a move does is based on a number of factors that most people don't need to know unless they want an accurate approximation of how much damage their move will do. You also do not need to know the formula for it, because there are many programs online that will do it for you.
Move Order - Move order is based on two things. First is move priority. There are 13 tiers of move order most are 0 (the range from -7 to 5) and the higher the priority the earlier the Pokémon gets to take its turn. If the two moves that are being used are the same then who gets to move first is based on who has the higher speed stat. If they are tied, it is a 50/50 chance as to who gets to go first
Items - There are too many items to explain all of them, but they mostly give advantages except for a few that some people put on their Pokémon then use moves to switch them onto their opponents Pokémon.
Abilities - These used to be traits. They are added perks that the Pokémon gets (sometimes they can be hindering). Abilities are one of the big factors in setting certain Pokémon apart from others as Pokémon can only have a few different abilities. There are some that are game changers and others that are virtually useless.
That about wraps it up for competitive battling for today, later on I will go into more detail about certain aspects of the game. As you can see there are nearly infinite amounts of possible combinations of Pokémon and it is not nearly as simple as people often think.
See you next time!
Chauncey
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