We all see that games are better as double/triple battles and without levels, right?

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

When you start your game, your Pokemon knows Tackle and Growl or their analogues in most Pokemon games. It takes a while before your Pokemon know moves of their type, let alone moves worth using.

Compare this to Pokemon Colosseum where you start with a level 25 Espeon and level 26 Umbreon so you can start the game with useful moves like Helping Hand. The Double Battle format adds immense value to status moves like Helping Hand, Taunt, Snatch, Screech, Toxic, Confuse Ray... And yet Pokemon Colosseum expects you to grind levels, grind the darkness out of Shadow Pokemon, grind and grind and grind...

"Level" is an abstraction. It's not real. It's not the time a master swordsman spent practicing that makes him deadlier than a novice, it's what he did during that time improving his techniques. Compare a stab from a master swordsman with a stab from a novice. A master swordsman knows where to aim, how to hold the blade, how to swing, how to do everything perfectly and make it look easy, but damage is damage, and deciding the master swordsman's years of grinding his skills should confer a +50 damage bonus onto his strikes is a gameplay mechanic with no foundation in reality, just like how you're fine when losing 98 out of your 99 hit points but being sneezed on takes your final HP away and kills you.

A Pokemon's "Level" never truly matters in a fight unless it's far above you, making the battle unfair, or far below you, making the battle irrelevant and tediously easy. And be real, when was the last time you EVER saw any Pokemon game, fangame, or romhack force the player into an unwinnable battle against Pokemon 50 levels higher than yours specifically to tell you this bad guy/champion is a big deal and make you want vengeance? This isn't Devil May Cry 3. You don't lose to Gary Oak in a scripted event atop Pokemon Tower forcing you to improve and unlock a new Regional Gimmick Power Up Mechanic in your darkest hour. This is Pokemon, a turbo controller and a blindfold beats the game for you during battle, and going exactly where you're told during overworld exploration beats the game for you outside of battle, this isn't Fallout and you're never tasked with investigating and figuring things out for yourself unless "take otherwise useless key item to guy who says he needs it" is a challenging puzzle for you.

Why do many post-game battles offer Level 50 and Open Level versions? Because grinding to level 50 is tedious, but grinding to lv100 is worse, unless you have enough EXP Candies to make it quicker, and what do those EXP Candies cost? How many hours of money grinding is necessary to get EXP Candies in your game? Between wild encounters, optional trainers, the possibility that your Pokemon game's player just added a low level Pokemon to his team, and the possibility that your players might get catch EXP for 40 Pokemon looking for one with the right IVs and Nature and Ability, you never know how much EXP your players will have at any given moment. A well-designed level curve can be replicated by making all Pokemon calculate their stats and move damage using the number 50 instead of that Pokemon's level.

How often have you accidentally overlevelled a Pokemon, trivializing any challenge he's involved in? How often do you use moves like Growl and Screech in Single Battles and how often do you use them in tough challenging Double Battles?

Pokemon already allows a game to have a gradual difficulty curve as enemy trainers carry gradually higher numbers of gradually stronger Pokemon with gradually better moves and gradually better held items and gradually better teambuilding composition. What really separates fighting Brock and his few Rock-type Pokemon from the nearby Trainers stronger than him? It's not like he uses Weather or Held Items to make him a more memorable challenge in comparison to random Bird Catchers and Cue Balls and Super Nerds. What really separates fighting a level 10 Rattata with a level 10 Charmander from fighting a level 30 Rattata with a level 42 Charizard? Enemy trainers can even be fought in "Gauntlets" where you cannot heal without fainting or clearing the entire gauntlet, and fainting resets all trainers in the gauntlet. Someone out there finds it fun to enter a new area and face 8 Team Aqua grunts each with Sharpedos and Wailmer and Carvanhas ten levels below your starter and heal up between each one. He also finds grinding for skinner box tokens in microtransaction-filled freemium games fun. He'd be satisfied with anything because he hasn't yet learned the joy of games that decide a curated experience with tough and legitimately challenging enemies is better than a lengthy experience with padded content.

"But if my Bulbasaur fights a Caterpie and we both use Tackle it will take slightly too long for our level 50 HP to be depleted!" Then buff Tackle and trash moves like it from 30-35 to 60 base power. Pokemon can still evolve and learn better moves by levelling up, representing your Pokemon's growing mastery of combat and his own body, but that level of battle experience shouldn't magically devalue all foes below his magic number.

I truly believe Pokemon is better with double or triple battles (preferably triple battles with Near Target restrictions removed) and without levels, change my mind.

 

[wrigty12]

Hesitant to respond since I'm not reading your entire post (way too long for me to read at this time), but based on the title, I disagree with both points.

Double battles? Great addition, happy they added them. But Single battles have their place too, and allow people to enjoy individual Pokemon more. Triple battles (and rotation battles) I never found a good addition, so I'd prefer them to not be included unless it was like once in a while for something like a cool boss battle or event or something.

Removing the level system is just removing something that is a core part of almost all RPGs. It has some problems, but not enough to get rid of the system. Sure, griding is a thing, but if the game was well balanced then griding isn't needed.

 

[Aki]

Why do many post-game battles offer Level 50 and Open Level versions?

I think this is the key detail here: all the issues you're brought up about levelling are valid when you're looking at the act of Pokemon battling as an isolated system. Before the post game though, the game isn't just a battle simulator. There's a whole journey going on there during the main game, typically with a story that has themes of growth. The levelling and evolution of Pokemon make more sense when viewed as reinforcements to make the player really feel like they've grown and progressed over the course of the game, even if they haven't actually gotten any more skilled at playing the game.

It is casual and typically aimed at kids after all. The whole gym system exists to test the player's mastery of the battling mechanics, but really only focuses on type matchups because well, honestly that's so fundamental that if a new player doesn't know at least a few type matchups they are going to suffer pretty badly. Fan games are in a really sweet spot to address these issues (since devs don't have to design inclusively for players new to Pokemon) but designing a game around that... well it's just more niche lol.

If you want to improve how Pokemon battles work you can just make a battle sim or difficulty hack, but doing those well is a bit of work that I think a lot of devs are more interested in investing in the worldbuilding/storytelling parts of their game. There's also less stakes for failing; if my game is suppossed to be casual and ends up trivially easy, probably no one will complain and there will still be players drawn in by the game's other qualities. But If I try to design a challenging game and it's actually not that challenging, or uses cheap/frustrating methods to challenge the player, well then few will care to play it.

 

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

It feels like a false equivalence to say a Pokemon story can only be either a battle sim with good battles, or a story with bad battles. Difficulty hacks wouldn't be as popular as they are if people didn't want battles to challenge the mind and take more thought than mashing A on your strongest attack until it's over.

 

[wrigty12]

Yep, and properly balanced single battles can provide that challenge. No need to force overly complicated battles (2, 3+) every battle to do that.

 

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

Yep, and properly balanced single battles can provide that challenge. No need to force overly complicated battles (2, 3+) every battle to do that.

Overly complicated?

Tons of Pokemon, strategies, and moves are banned in Singles because it's not balanced. Funbro can make your battles last forever. Assist+Revival Blessing+Prankster can make battles last basically forever. Baton Pass simplifies the game into "Are you ready for this common powerful threat, with a hyper-specific counter that makes your team worse at dealing with anything else, and did you deploy it at the right time and get lucky or not?".

Double and Triple Battles inherently balance the game and make choices made during the battle more important than what Pokemon were brought to the battle. One OP Pokemon can have multiple attacks hit it in a single turn. One of your Pokemon can use Taunt or Spore or Trick+Choice Specs while your other Pokemon attack foes or defend him with Follow Me.

 

[MacedWindow]

You hit on excellent points, OP! However, I think you're too quick to the throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'd dial back the scope of your argument to say more modestly that Pokemon's leveling system is imperfect, and ripe for experimentation. Game Freak's trepidation when it comes to tweaking their systems is infamous. Well, that's exactly where fan games come in. So let's get cracking; we're definitely on the right sort of site to brainstorm some solutions.

Red and Blue naively tapped the whole gamut of RPG conventions. Given the ubiquity and utility of levels, Game Freak no doubt threw them into the mix, and for safe measure, placed them front and center. Was that a mistake? I don't know; Game Boy games could only do so much. However, there's also no denying the timeless, lizard-brain appeal in the "number go up" abstraction. What's inexcusable is Pokemon's 25+ years of complacency, rehashing more or less the exact same formula.

Things might be changing, though. A recent patent submitted by Game Freak suggests they intend on imminently revamping the Pokemon bio format, especially pertaining to how much of a monster's history is preserved when transferred between games i.e. via Pokemon Bank. This could amount to little more than a gimmick, whereby a Pokemon retains an exhaustive history of e.g. the exact time and date for the past 1000 times it's fainted. But for the sake of speculation, suppose Game Freak are cooking up something more substantial than, I don't know, breeding family trees. Maybe they want to foster more attachment between players and their Pokemon. I can't think of a better antidote to the apathy engendered toward one's reserves by the mass catching tendencies of recent titles like GO and Arceus. But how can Game Freak make such a system compelling? Let's get imaginative:

-What if Pokemon are entirely re-conceptualized such that they can revert to previous evolution stages. Highly unlikely, but this is exactly the kind of decisive change that would get players excited to transfer their starter (and thus pay for Pokemon Bank) between multiple generations.

-What if Pokemon are further individualized, cosmetically or otherwise. Clinging on to a shiny is one thing, but what if the legitimate as independently verified by Game Freak's servers Bulbasaur you caught 5 years ago is a one in ten thousand specimen that can use Thunder? To boot, it also has an exceedingly rare electric-yellow colour palette. Making it most special however, is the brand new training system; you're the one who methodically raised your special Thunder Bulbasaur.

The point of these examples is to show how seamlessly they could dovetail with the existing levelling abstraction. In the first, levelling could be a repeating process, thus fostering constant and repeated engagement with one's favourite Pokemon (i.e. not just species, but individuals). Should the second example come true, levelling could be expanded beyond mere stat bonuses; perhaps your Bulbasaur caps its stat gains at level 50, but can level up to 1000 and beyond for various other rewards.

Now, you may be turned off by the motivations behind these systems (MMO grinds); I get the sense you're competitive-first. But that's okay, great even, because RPGs have been iterating on the levelling concept for over fifty years. There's no shortage of stellar examples from which a hardcore fan game can draw inspiration. There are sphere grids, and tech trees, and job systems, you name it.

My favourite twist on the Pokemon formula specifically comes from a hack I've just recently played - Garbage Green. You're meant to play it as a hardcore Nuzlocke, which means you can't grind levels against wilds. Likewise, you're permitted infinite Rare Candies. The clever push/pull is this: Rare Candies can level Pokemon up to your current level cap (determined by badge count), but Pokemon can earn EXP to grow one additional level between caps. So, to get an extra key level-up move or evolution before an upcoming boss, you have to expose your Pokemon in trainer battles. This particular hack doesn't justify the granular 1-100 level range, but it definitely leverages the existing abstraction into something more original and congruent to the traditional Pokemon formula. It also resolves your complaint about level-ups feeling insignificant, since each blip corresponds to a discrete and intelligible reward - a new move or evolution before the next boss. It's not hard to imagine another hack that runs with this system, but more ambitiously, dares to allow for three, four, five, or more level jumps between caps.

Generally speaking, all Pokemon games can be played like Fire Emblem-lite. If you don't grind at all, so long as the level curve is carefully constructed and EXP all is set to off, there's a quaint but engaging little meta game you can play between bosses. Like raising units in Fire Emblem, distributing EXP in this way becomes a strategic choice. The subtle but deceptively innovative hack Crystal Legacy has meticulously curated EXP yields, but you'd never know it without playing a Nuzlocke.

So I hope I've made a fair case for levels. And that's kind of as a devil's advocate. I'll be honest, more often than not, I also believe games can improve by ditching their facile abstractions. However, if done right, levelling systems can be at the very least serviceable. When it comes to Pokemon, even an ambitious fan game might try to reckon with levels because of how familiar the system is to most players. Fixing levels can thus be interpreted as just another one of those entrenched challenges.