Arbitrary's Purruglytorio: Competitive Pokemon Has Destroyed Me and Left Me Destitute (Part Two)

Hello and welcome back to ArbitraryWater's Internet Write Up Adventures. I'm an internet man whose username originates from me making my Xbox Live account in 2007 and picking the funny randomly generated one. Now, as an adult man in his thirties, I am forever saddled by the burden my past self has placed upon me, much like the burden my past self has placed upon me with this blog by making it a multi-part affair. If you haven't read that to see how my adult pokenightmare started, I highly recommend doing so. It will provide context for this current hyperfixation.

What’s the Deal with Competitive Pokemon?

Unlike Nintendo, who would (rightfully) rather banish Smash players to the bowels of hell than let them compete openly, The Pokemon Company actually encourages and facilitates the competitive scene for their games. The Pokemon World Championships were only a month ago in San Francisco and were about as big as they’ve ever been. In addition to the main competitive games, the card game, Pokemon Go, and even that MOBA I forgot existed all had major tournaments. Pokemon as a brand continues to be a big deal even 30 years on, but the competitive side of things has seen a lot of growth post-pandemic, to the point where it now has its own dedicated client in Pokemon Champions (we’ll get to that). It's no longer just the domain of that weird guy in your friend group, it's for everyone*!

This is in spite of the fact that Pokemon as a competitive game is a complicated, labyrinthine abyss with so many different factors to keep track of at any given time. For anyone just used to steamrolling through the video games by overleveling their starter and clicking super effective attacks, it can be daunting to seriously entertain the competitive side of everyone’s favorite monster collecting RPG for children. Not only are there type matchups, pokemon stats, abilities, and moves, but you also have to think about how they interact in the context of doubles. While the dominant fan format (Smogon) still uses 6v6 singles as its baseline, the official VGC format uses 4v4 double battles, which I generally prefer. Having two of your own pokemon on the field opens up a lot of strategies and makes more support-oriented setups viable. 

See, while in singles a lot of the game involves setting up entry hazards and switching around in order to safely sweep the enemy team, doubles is significantly less focused on switching since you only have four pokemon to play with and two of them are already on the field. While switching is still an important aspect, the name of the game is knowing when your opponent will use moves like “Protect” which fully nullifies all damaging and status moves thrown against them (using it consecutively significantly reduces the chances it will work a second or third time.) Using protect with your own pokemon still allows you to do something with its partner, and being able to use that move or bait it out is one of the main cornerstones of playing doubles well. The finals of this year’s world championships were won because Takuma Yamazaki correctly read his opponent’s protect and used “feint” in order to break through it and double up on his opponent’s Charizard. It’s not dissimilar from making hard reads in a fighting game, but instead of guessing that your opponent will jump, it’s about guessing that your opponent will use Fake Out and punishing them accordingly.

This is only the surface level of things you need to think about, and if you've watched Jan's PokeMonday Night Combat streams, you can see him and Shawn trying to make some of those calculations out loud. You can also see my attempts to trip Jan up myself on a couple of occasions, and in the final episode of this season, falling flat on my ass with my Mike Minotti-themed Gravity apple setup. It's a shame Jan finished his streams before the most recent regulation, so I could show off this Shiny Garchomp Z I nicknamed "Garcon."

Pokemon Champions is my Sisyphean Torment

Pokemon Champions exists to fill two very specific needs: first, it allows Game Freak to separate the competitive side of Pokemon from the single player RPGs. I would not be surprised if the next generation of Pokemon moves towards something a bit more experimental or real-time for its normal battles, especially if the legends games are any indication. Second, it offers a much gentler on-ramp to actually competing at Pokemon for people who don’t want to spend the previously prohibitive amount of time that was previously required. While Pokemon Showdown will continue to exist for the real sickos out there, having an official free-to-play client that is nothing but battling makes a lot of sense. I’ve dabbled in the competitive side of things before, but never fully invested because doing so always seemed like a tremendous hassle. Hidden or secondary mechanics that don’t really matter for a normal casual playthrough suddenly matter a lot and require far more time and investment. Natures? EVs? IVs? All important, all things that used to require hours upon hours to fully optimize for the purposes of online or in-person battles, even with many quality of life improvements throughout the generations.

It was this accessibility that drew me to Champions in the first place. As I said in the first write up, being stuck at work occasionally having nothing to do led me down a competitive pokemon youtube hole. Thanks to important hot tips from world champions such as Wolfe Glick and Ray Rizzo, I figured I had a strong baseline to start with, alongside whatever pokemon I needed to import from both my 3DS and Switch. This is partially true. If you understand the absolute basics of how to construct a pokemon team, of what does and does not work, you can easily get through Poke Ball and even Great Ball tier. Once you get past that and enter the realm of people who know what they’re doing, making progress on a ranked ladder becomes another matter entirely. Unlike fighting games, there’s no execution barrier to blame for my failures, just a combination of team composition and being able to pilot it in game. 

It should not surprise anyone who knows me that my hipster contrarian tendencies manifest themselves in unfortunate, self-defeating ways when I play Pokemon. If you listen to the podcast I did around Champions’ launch, you’ll hear me arrogantly proclaim I would not use a Garchomp because Garchomp is “too meta”. This has long since been beaten out of me, because I am not as good as the people on youtube who can win online tournaments using weird gimmick teams. I’ve managed to claw my way up to Master Ball using off-meta picks, but even those off-meta picks are bolstered by the current standbys of the format, like Sneasler, Incineroar, and yes, Garchomp. While unorthodox team comps and niche pokemon have managed to win high profile tournaments recently (See: Mega Meowstic winning a regional just last weekend) I don't think I'm ever going to fully top the ladder with a problematic fave like, say, Rampardos or Mega Pidgeot. (it won't stop me from trying though)

The Sisyphean part of this torment, of course, comes from all of the stress and anger that the zero-sum ranked 1v1 ladder entails. My general goal in every season I take seriously is to get to at least Master Ball Rank 4. Champion-tier, which exclusively consists of the top 300 players, is probably beyond my grasp. I like competitive games, I like competing against other human players, and I like the experience of learning and improving at something even if it involves getting the metaphorical shit kicked out of me now and again. I also fucking hate it. There's something about Pokemon especially that has led to a handful of crash outs on stream, like when I lose to yet another Charizard Y sun team I should ostensibly know how to deal with by now, or when someone with a weird gimmick setup team manages to execute on said gimmick before I can fully comprehend how to counter it. There's a reason why I jokingly included an "F-Bomb Counter" on my champions streams, and it's that I am apparently a toxic monster whenever it comes to 1v1 stuff like this.

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't fun though. Sometimes. Just you wait, this Alolan Raichu Dual Terrain + Charizard X setup is gonna blow up! (Chat is this anything?)

Miscellaneous Gripes

While I think Champions is a move in the right direction and will probably make the game healthier overall, I do hope it capitalizes on some of the potential it gains from being a separate client. On Pokemon Showdown, there is a special format called "National Dex" that includes every battle gimmick from throughout the series at the same time. Outside of certain formats of Pokemon Sun and Moon having both Z-Moves and Mega Evolutions, this hasn't been something fully capitalized on and it's something I hope they do in Champions during its lifetime. My fear is that The Pokemon Company, with its deeply embedded fear of rocking the boat, might not do something cool like that because "it will scare off potential new players." Motherfuckers, it's not like the on-ramp for Champions is in any way welcoming to randos. You're already catering to people spending their time staring at damage calculators and that's why we should have both Terastilization and Mega Evolutions at the same time. Let's do it. Cowards. Maybe not Dynamax though. You can keep Dynamax back in PokeBritain where it belongs.

The other thing that has chafed during the first few months of this app's existence is the relatively slow roll out of new pokemon and items into Champions' new formats. While the limited pool of items and relatively lower power level has led to overlooked pokemon like Aerodactyl becoming staples, more selfishly some of my personal faves have yet to show up. Let me use this shiny Porygon Z I spent like six hours farming! Let me shove an assault vest on this Archaludon and make it an unkillable nightmare creature! With the current regulation (M-C) we're finally getting access to the terrain setters and all the potential that entails, but I am concerned that they're going to keep at the current pace of 15-20 new pokemon (half of which will actually be relevant) until Wind and Waves comes out and inevitably upends everything.

The last gripe slash concern has to do with how champions might handle special and legendary pokemon. See, I do think Champions' gacha is pretty generous, giving you more than enough of the grind currency to eventually brute force your way to a competent team without the need to import from home. However, there is currently one pokemon, one notably powerful and useful pokemon, who is not present among the pool in the gacha. That pokemon is Mega Floette, which you can currently only legitimately acquire by finishing the main story of Pokemon Z-A. Now, if I was some sort of smart person, I might say "well, that's fine, people have learned how to counter Floette and it's not as dominant as it was during the first few months of Champions." Instead, I finished Pokemon Z-A. Surely that won't lead to some sort of horrible write up. (It might lead to a horrible write up)