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6 Important Lessons That Other Games Can Learn From Pokémon X And Y

The Pokémon series is such a mainstay in videogames that it’s sometimes hard to perceive it in extremes. I don’t often think of Pokémon games as terribly innovative or terribly stale - rather, Pokémon is an ever-present entity in the handheld landscape that is always there for the taking when I desire it. At least, that’s how I felt before Pokémon X and Y came out.

Doing It For Sport

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With almost every Pokémon game preceding X and Y, the online aspect of the multiplayer would improve slightly, but was never really good enough to be considered full featured or robust. Local play was always easy with link cables in the old days, and IR connections made it even more simple in Black and White, but short of the Global Trade Station’s debut during the Diamond and Pearl days, nothing about the online Pokémon experience has ever been terribly convenient, never mind innovative.

What X and Y does to address this is essentially make all online operations easily accessible from the bottom screen via the Player Search System. Both online and StreetPass activities are accessible from this interface, and interaction with local friends or any other nearby players can be initiated at pretty much any time. There’s even a fun little system where fellow local players or folks on your friends list can receive timed buffs from you as assistance in dire scenarios, and vice versa.

The Global Trade Station is of course still present, and perhaps the most substantial change (and one that fundamentally alters how players go about catching them all) is the ability to request and trade for Pokémon who have not been added to your Pokédex. Some purists feel it makes things too easy, but I couldn’t disagree more – with over 700 hundred monsters, why wouldn’t this be possible?

If you think about how Pokémon‘s world works, would an actual, real-life trainer (the Pokémon anime comes to mind) honestly attempt to catch every single Pokémon by hand? It would probably take multiple lifetimes. Trading for rare, unseen monsters — whether for collection’s sake or to help build up your dream team — is an awesome addition, and the excitement upon notification that a requested Pokémon has arrived is just as thrilling as actually catching it in the wild, albeit different. Think of it like that feeling you get when an eagerly anticipated package arrives at your doorstep, as opposed to going to the store for the item yourself. Like it or not, there’s no doubt that it’s an extremely helpful feature when filling out your ‘Dex.

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