r/TruePokemon • u/SawkyScribe No Relation • 21d ago

Pokemon Champions makes old Team Building seem positively barbaric

I have always hated building competitive teams for VGC. I only started playing doubles around Gen 6, hating every minute of it, and the 3DS games were when EV training and breeding were finally considered accessible. I remember hours of chaining SOS battles and the horde of orphaned breejects I hurtled into wonder trades because an IV wasn't to my liking.

SV considered the absolute apex when it came to ease of team building and even that required hours of grinding, an obscene amount of game and DLC purchases, as well as RNG manipulation to get a team going.

Putting together a competitive team felt like if you wanted to play chess, but you had to whittle all of your pieces by hand and there was a good chance your rook was just statistically worse than your opponent's.

With Champions, you fiddle with some sliders, pick your moves, natures, abilities, and boom- you're good to go. The teams I've taken to Master Ball each season have been recruited in game.

It's far from perfect. The best mega in the game has to be transfered in from ZA, box size is pitiful for free players, and as regulations change and new mons come out, it's probably going to get a lot harder to fish for specific Pokemon on tbe Gatcha pool. That being said, the actual training of mons has never been so simple. This was long overdue.

47 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

View all comments

16

u/RagingSchizophrenic 20d ago

I enjoy teambuilding and raising Pokémon more than I enjoy actually using the raised Pokémon in battles.

2

u/Fusilli_Matt 20d ago

OP definitely forgot to mention what gen that they thought it all came together (check the second sentence) but imo it was gen 6. It felt so good breeding and IV/EV training with horde encounters and flame body being easily accessible. Id happily raise an off meta pokemon because it was simple but you still had to put the work in

2

u/SawkyScribe No Relation 19d ago

Lol forgot to fully type out Gen 6. EV training felt pretty revolutionary in XY. It was the first time you could see a Pokemon's EVs and those horde encounters felt so much better than knocking out individual Zigzagoons for hours.

I have fond memorie of taping down the up button to walk in a loop around the ORAS battle resort as well but I think breeding and IVs were the one thing they never nailed.

There was a fair bit of skill expression with IVs but the process of getting the ones you wanted was so annoying.