If you were rebuilding the Pokemon games from scratch, starting at Gen 1, what sort of changes would you make? Whether this is including changes from later generations from the start, fixing things you view as mistakes, or other changes.

Restrictions: The end result has to be visibly recognizable as Pokemon, ie being targeted at a preteen and up demographic (having some older appeal is acceptable, but no grimdark). The focus remains on catching, battling, trading, etc.

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Some gameplay changes:
- Including gender and sexual dimorphism from the beginning. The Nidoran line wouldn't be split into six Pokemon, instead being just three.
- Pokemon are limited to four move choices in battle, but can exchange which ones they have access to out of battle. Any move they have learned or could have learned at any point is an option. From my understanding, Pokemon Arceus does this.

Evolutions changes:
- Include the baby Pokemon (Pichu, Elekid, etc.) from later generations back into Gen 1, along with the breeding mechanic. Make more baby Pokemon types where appropriate.
- Fix the Cubone line. There is a very good argument that Cubone should be an offshoot of Kangaskhan, based on their design similarities.
- (Potentially) Make Charizard a fire/dragon type. This has been one of the biggest complaints I've heard over the years. My only problem would be that it would make Charmander even more attractive of a pick than it already is, making the other two Gen 1 starters rather obsolete.
- Make Dragonite more closely resemble its Dratini and Dragonair predecessors. There have been numerous art pieces related to this, like this one that has a split evolution.
- Fill out the Eevee line with all potential 18 eeveelutions (includes Normal).

Setting changes:
- Make it a little more realistic. Not just removing Pokedex entries that say "this Pokemon has a body temperature equal to the surface of the sun," or height/weights that make no sense (Wailord would be so light for its size that it would float like a blimp). But little things like when people or Pokemon eat other Pokemon.
- A more consistent storyline across the games. One of the things I loved about Gen 2 was how it continued the story of Gen 1.

 

3-5 save files.

I know it's a bad Idea if you're profit driven, since now siblings can share games, but it's gonna enhance the gaming expereince a ton and people would feel more comfortable experimenting.

Also make Pokemon level up much faster up to the level of the next gym leader, and slow down a lot once you reach it. This is to decrease need for grinding and to prevent overleveling.

Make the pc accessible via the pokedex from everywhere, so you can always switch out items/pokemon you need outside of battles.

Also make low level healing/battle items much cheaper, I think it would be more appropriate if you felt more free to use them and makes the trainer feels more involve in the battle. Obviously things like hyper potions/full restore should be just as rare.

 

I'd end it at Gen 5.

 

Some things not seen in thread already. A lot of this is based on my recent Emerald Nuzlocke, so it might be Nuzlocke-centered.

Lessened HM requirements, but not complete removal
Some HMs are decent in battle, some are less so. But what really gets me is having to have three or four water traversal HMs, and when a HM is absolutely terrible or just flat-out outshone.
Rock Smash - it's 20 power, and has a chance of lowering defense. Pretty much any Fighting-type will have a better damage, and it would only out-damage a standard STAB move against Dark, Rock, Steel, or Ice if that's a <27 power move.
Flash is not massively useful in game because it effects the other pokemon, and doesn't persist through swaps. Double Team has a self-effect, and only 22 TOTAL pokemon can't learn it. If you want trainers to not go into an area, just block it off with an avalanche until a certain point.

Maybe shift down to Fly, Surf, and Strength, but they each have tiers for outside of battle- Fly initially functions as teleport, then as a bike, then as Fly; Surf adds in Whirlpool/Waterfall/Dive, and Strength as Rock Smash, Cut, Strength. More badges/levels to get higher uses.

It does sort of make sense, in-universe, to restrict travel on pokemon, and it does allow areas to be locked off, but it also can mean you get a HMSlave. I'll always be upset that my Gyarodos ended up as HMMachine in Silver.


Sensible Elite Four/Gym Typing
Whatever the purpose of the Elite Four and the Gyms in-universe, outside-universe they are a challenge for people to beat. I like the idea I've seen that the starters are Easy/Normal/Hard (Bulbasaur/Squirtle/Charmander) mode against the first two gyms. But after that, I'd like to see gyms have a bit of variety - you shouldn't be able to blow past two in a row with a single type (Wattson/Flannery with a Swampert is obscenely easy). Ideally, you shouldn't be able to do two with a single Pokemon, but I'll accept that's basically impossible to set-up.

For Elite 4/Champion, same again. Try to avoid setting up circumstances where one type is strong against two (or three) of them.

In Hoenn, you have Dark/Ghost/Ice/Dragon, then Water or Steel (sort of).
Fighting type gets through two or three of these. And sure, it's then weak to one of the others, but that's a bit unbalanced.

Further, there's no cycle here.

So I'd set up something similar to the starters - Fighting, Ghost, Dark, then Dragon, then the Champion.

Or swing another way - in Gen1, there wasn't enough pokemon of each type, so they subbed in 'thematic' pokemon. Roll up with a "Defensive", "Fast", "Strong", "Special", "Psuedo-Legendary" sets. Make the E4 all have variety teams like a player.


Sensible Trainers
Going through Victory Road, and you come across an ACE trainer, who's looking to challenge the Elite 4 himself... With a Level 44 Cacturne.

What.

Spoiler

I lost four of my team to the double Slaking, Gardevoir, Dusclops team. But still. Skill Swap on Slaking was more strategy than I thought the AI did

I'm not saying I want to fight twelve teams of six level 50+ varied pokemon in Victory Road, but I'd like for trainers to feel more like they're actually aiming to do the same as you, even if they're just not quite so good.

Gyms out of order
Maybe I want to skip Brock, and come back to fight a level 45 Rhyperior, Golem, and Steelix?

Let me.



I'm sure there's more. Nothing springing to mind yet.

 

I haven't really played the last few Pokemon games (Last one I really played was X & Y, and before that Black and White, so it's been a while), but there's a few things I'd change if I wanted to get back into/reimagine the series. Biggest thing that I would do is to make it impossible to play the games the way that I play them. That is, take one actual Pokemon, typically the starter, and then 5 HM bots that never see combat and beat the entire game with that.

To do that, I'd do the following:

1. Remove leveling from Pokemon entirely. Raising Pokemon would become a matter of 'training' them for certain roles, where using certain moves/attacks puts a weight on the mon's stats. E.g., a Pokemon that has used quick attack a lot will lose, say, 8 points from def and 4 points from sp def, but gain 10 points in spd and 5 points in atk. This allows you to specialize your Pokemon to specific roles, as well as removing the grind to make them relevant in combat, but does still allow optimization freaks to pursue perfected rosters.
2. Remove TMs and (most) leveling-learned moves and add gameplay to teaching moves. Something like if your Pokemon sees the move used often enough (I would count the Pokemon being in its ball on your belt during combat for this) and the move is one that Pokemon can learn, it unlocks the ability to learn the move in question. You can then go spend 30-60s playing a little minigame, which earns progress towards unlocking the move (and can potentially complete it in one go), with a different minigame for each broad category of move.
   1. I'd also make it so that gym badges interact with this system, where gyms have a collection of type-appropriate moves, as well as a few unique to their gym, that you can get them to teach your pokemon once you've collected the badge. Just seems appropriate.
3. Make the Gym leaders, Elite 4 and Champion legitimate threats with... not 'meta' rosters, but relatively close while staying within their individual theming. It's just kinda silly how easy it is to stomp through the allegedly best in the world with one pokemon that's even type-disadvantaged vs half of them, and I'd love there to be actual threats from them.

That's all I can really think of right now. The big thing is just to make it so you don't really have a choice not to engage with the "pet rearing" and roster aspects of the game in order to beat it, as that would vastly improve the experience IMO.

 

The restrictions you put in place are the things I'd arguable change the most lol. Like the entire concept of dogfighting with pokemon, the 'gym circuit' etc.

But if I must:

HMs as a concept need to be yeeted. If it make sense for your pokemon to be able to ferry you across the water, it should be able to - without the need to learn to. Likewise if it makes sense for it to move a boulder etc.

Remove ability limits. Instead let Pokemon learn as many moves as they want. To make it interesting, have moves able to gain experience, evolve and level too, so even if you can have all the moves, specializing is rewarded. Example, Vine Whip starts as is, you use it x amount of times and meet a hidden req and it 'evolves.' You can then chose to give it a rooting component, or increase its speed making it impossible to miss. Extrapolate etc.

Fully action combat. There is so much of the fantasy of Pokemon instantly lost because it's a turn-based game. Movement, positioning, dodging etc. Given that you play as the trainer and not the creatures though, my mind goes to a Digimon World 1 kind of combat (you don't control the action combat, at best you advise), only way more advanced with AI that makes sense for the particular species' eccentricities etc.

The Circle of Life, and with that real danger in the wilds (and thus aged up characters).

 

Counterpoint: I'd make it even more turnbased somehow. Action games are fun but christ not everything needs to be action central. Hell, I might just force the games to remain 2D.

The big change I'd make is that I would simply not abandon the gimmicks after every single generation. Why were seasons abandoned? Why were following Pokemon removed? What's with this Mega Evolution replaced with Z-moves replaced with Dynamaxes and Gigamax and now replaced with Terallizes or whatever?

 

Hell yes. Top down pixel art forever.

 

Modifying the turn-based nature of the game so that the Speed stat affected how quickly the action bar filled up would be cool. If you've got a fast enough Pokémon, you could take two turns for every one of the enemy.

 

I'd also create a new Pokémon type, reserved only for those alien Pokémon like Deoxys. To represent how they are outside the natural order. Not sure how it would interact with other types, though.

 

A lot of good ideas here.

I especially like this.

But, provided I'm making it now, for the Switch, I'd first and foremost focus on making it good technically.
I've read some Reddit post saying that Sword and Shield have originally been planned as 3DS games and it sounded like it could be true.
Fair enough, that was the cope for their unfathomably terrible technical state.

Wonder what the cope'll be for Scarlet and Violet.

 

Frankly, turn-based combat isn't fit for purpose anymore (to be fair, by purpose I mean, if you at all want challenge in your games). There are ways to make it interesting, and even amazing (DOS:2), but that requires a level of complexity that Pokemon will never have.

The only way to make it challenging is to deliberately hinder yourself and apply self-imposed restrictions.

You could also take the control out of the player's hands and make the combat basically like the Football Manager games (I would not be opposed to this. It also feels very trainer-y), but there's no way this would be popular.

 

This thread is about changing the Pokemon series from the ground up, though? It can have that kind of complexity if you want it to, we're all just pretending anyway.

 

More than one Pokemon at a time. Team based combat. Something more akin to Fire Emblem.

 

Every Pokémon should be catchable in each game. Appearance %'s could be cut to tenth's or hundreds of a percent for rare/pseudo-legendary/legendary Pokémon, but they should all be at least theoretically available. Edition specific rewards should be bonuses to Pokemon Stats - Red gives you +10% Spec. Def and Blue gives you +10% Speed, for example.

Trade evolutions are gone.

The entire game is open world a la Skyrim.

As a compliment to the open world nature of the game, Gym trainers, Team Rocket, your Rival, the Élite 4, Pokémon Champion, and other mandatory game play trainers are scaled in a) level of Pokémon, b) number of Pokémon, c) Pokémon move set, and d) level of available items. These trainers should always be slightly better than you to ensure gameplay is always challenging.

Challenge Brock with your lvl 9 Charmander, He'll have an lvl 10 Geodude and a lvl 12 Onix. Challenging him as your last Gym Leader? He'll have a your level +3 Golem, Steelix, Tyrannitar, Kabutops, Omastar, etc etc.

 

Pokemon should be a JRPG running Game of Champions as a storyline.

 

I'm with Cheddar on ending the FOMO and buy the same game twice plus a monthly subscription for storage/transfer.

Hell, I'd take it a step further and make unique encounters like legendaries repeatable, to an extent. For people who want shinies, I'd make some difficult questchain that involves releasing the unique pokemon and running the encounter again that improves the shiny rate more than simply save scumming 8200 times. The strat to getting a dope ass black Charizard should be to play the game, not reset the game.

I'd also love for more regions to be connected like gen 2. Gimme a chunnel ride from Galar to Kalos, flights from Unova to Alola with a layover in PokeCanadia, silly shit like that.

 

Oh yeah, that was one of the points I was going to bring up. A degree of story continuance, where you can see the consequences of previous games ripple forward into the next ones.

Hell, you could do an MMO thing and have one game with expansions that bring in the new regions. So you can really catch em all, since you keep all the Pokemon you caught in the previous game.

 

If any setting lends itself to an MMO, Pokemon is it. Imagine a landscape the size of Skyrim or Morrowind, but with all of the Pokemon regions included in it.