Rope Them In, Then Hook Them
Underneath its cute and cuddly exterior, Pokémon games are notoriously known not only for their extensive metagame and thriving competitive multiplayer community, but also for the dreaded practice known as EV training. I won’t explain it in full here, but essentially what EV training is (or was) all about is strategically battling specific wild Pokémon to gain points known as effort values. Accumulating effort values for particular stats gives your Pokémon a sizeable advantage over those who hasn’t had the same tactical training, and EVs are often placed so that a Pokémon may either just survive blows from or just be able to knockout specific opponents in specific situations.
I could wax poetic about how clever it is to embed such an intricate system into such an accessible RPG for days, but I’ll refrain – EVs and their even-more-maddening counterpart IVs (don’t get me started) are old news and have been around for a while. What’s different with Pokémon X and Y is that Game Freak has gone ahead and taken advanced, previously invisible subsystems and made them visible to everyone via Super Training. Essentially, they took the super-secret techniques hidden inside an immensely popular game, and brought them to the rest of the game’s audience – all without changing how they work or angering existing EV and IV gurus (well, not too much anyways).
To me, this is almost like achieving the unachievable. Think about it – if Super Training successfully goes mainstream, you’ll have literally millions of kids, teens, and twenty-somethings not just blasting through the story, beating the Elite Four, and calling it a day, but actually investing in well-trained, powerful, competition-calibur monsters. Not only that, but once you’ve put hundreds of hours into breeding perfect teams from the ground up, you don’t just up and walk away from the series like so many normally do after a certain age. Short of maybe Call of Duty, I can’t think of any other series that can simultaneously sell so many copies and actively engage so many players with its more “hardcore” aspects, so here’s hoping Game Freak’s plan works out going forward.
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