This whole “Pokemen” thing and people actually analyzing it thing got me to remember my old gritty Pokemon reboot concept which I have retyped from memory and such IN FULL!

I realize brentalfloss is just making a funny and I thought it was hilarious. This isn’t focused on that. I’m not too concerned about making it fit “rebellious” themes or having anything to do with a rock opera/concept album either. This is, straight up, What I Would Do If Nintendo Handed Me Pokemon. (Similar to the If I Made Zelda post I made a few months back!)

I’d LOVE feedback and discussion about this!

First off (and I saw a lot of discussion about this) is regarding the ethical treatment of Pokemon and how the whole thing is basically legalized cockfighting. To peg down on this, we take away the entire notion that Pokemon faint. When their HP reaches zero, they die. Straight up Nuzlocke rules! How does this change things, besides murdering Pokemon outright?

Trainer battles have organized rules. YOU CANNOT KILL ANOTHER TRAINER’S POKEMON. You can’t. I mean, you can, but it’s an automatic “game over” situation. Maybe it just disqualifies you from the battle. The important element is that it’s ‘possible’ to do so but it’s illegal. Like, you’d go to jail! Obviously you wouldn’t go to jail in the game (OR MAYBE YOU WOULD as a plot element!) but basically the idea is that you don’t kill another trainer’s Pokemon. Wild Pokemon are fair game—murder them all you want.

Instead, the key with Pokemon battles is now a matter of whittling your opponent’s strength down as much as you can to force the other trainer to forfeit. It now becomes a game of damaging the enemy Pokemon in significant amounts but not enough to outright kill the opponent. This HIGHLY would up the challenge AND cause lower-level moves like Ember or Scratch to STAY useful throughout the game, instead of just constantly being replaced with higher-level moves that just do the same thing but give more damage. In addition, it also makes you actually want to use attacks like Sleep Powder or Thunder Wave against AI opponents. After all, why bother paralyzing the opponent when you can just kill him outright?

In effect, what it does is take the catching-Pokemon mechanic and transpose it onto trainer battles. But given how difficult these fights could possibly get, and how long some of them might get drawn out, the number of enemy trainers needs to be decreased significantly. No longer can every Tom, Dick and Harry ten year old get a license and attack you with their team of four Metapods and a Caterpie. Trainer battles should be epic, and each one should be important. Gyms should have, at most, two or three “minion” trainers and they should all be far more unique than the ones presented in the game. No more going into gyms and dealing with an onslaught of twenty Koffings across ten trainers. Fuck that shit.

Catching Pokemon stays the same way. The mechanic’s good. Also, because only wild Pokemon can be killed by you, the same stands to reason: No (legit) trainer will actually try to kill your Pokemon, but wild Pokemon will. This means that wild Pokemon are a lot stronger than they tend to be in the games. They can actually kill you pretty readily! This makes venturing out into the Wild Tall Grass an actually scary proposition. In addition, there will be two types of tall grass—there’ll be tall grass that’s full of dangerous Pokemon and another full of lower-level, less dangerous Pokemon. The less dangerous path will make it easier to transverse routes and paths and be about as dangerous as Pokemon games are now. The idea here is to make it not annoying to travel from place to place.

Experience: Changes. Since you’re not murdering every trainer’s Pokemon you aren’t going to get experience from doing so. Instead, you gain experience by attacking. In fact, I say moves should level up now. Use a move, get experience points for that move. Get enough points, it levels up, becomes stronger. But that’s not the only change. Remember how I said moves should stay useful?

Each move, as it levels up, will have a “maximum” level of damage it can do. However, this ties into something I’ve been doing in every Pokemon game I’ve ever played: I hold A when my Pokemon does damage. Why? A long time ago, I read that doing so caused more damage. I’m sure it doesn’t. Why the hell would it? But it feels like it works. It’s a placebo thing. So why not take the placebo, and make it a reality?

Each Pokemon will also receive generic level experience based on how many battles they actually participate in. They gain the experience immediately when they’re placed into a battle, although it’s only tallied up upon the capture or defeat of another Pokemon.

When your Pokemon attacks, it will do damage (up to the “maximum” level) as long as you hold the A button. There could be all kinds of ways to make this work and indicate the maximum amount of damage and how that works, but I’m sure that could be hashed out more later.

Now, I did mention that it’s illegal to kill another trainer’s Pokemon…and what better way to villainize Team Rocket? Team Rocket are the only trainers in the game who will outright try to kill your Pokemon. In fact, it’s entirely possible for it to happen! And it’s fucking scary! Like Team Rocket should be! In fact, when Giovanni is revealed as the 8th Gym Leader, it’ll be scary as fuck because Giovanni will be willing to kill your Pokemon. Because fuck you, kid.

In fact, that’s something I want to make more obvious—it’s never outright stated, but by watching your Rival throughout the game, I’ve always figured it out. The journey of Red (or Blue if your game sucked) through the original game takes ‘several years’ and by the time you reach and defeat the Elite Four, Red and Blue are like, seventeen. You should age during the game! It should be totally obvious that the journey has taken years.

And, in my opinion, it should! The game should be massive and take much longer because, fuck it, it should take forever to raise Pokemon. But make it so there’s no grinding. Balance it so it’s fun while remaining challenging. Get some real friction in there. Make the actual game really fun to play! It’ll rock.