Arceus battles are terrible, not just because removing abilities and held items cuts out nearly all of the battle system’s depth besides spamming super effective moves, but the new strong/agile style are not optimal replacements. Often it just led to spamming agile moves or moves that raised the turn order, both for the player and wild Pokémon. There’s nothing fun getting an entire team swept by a Crobat because it can spam Air Slash 4 times in a row.
Then there’s just a lot of changes they made to make it “faster” then ends up just making it worse, such as being able to attack the moment you or your opponent switches Pokémon. Often during a trainer battle your Pokémon will have a type advantage against your opponent’s, but then they’ll switch Pokémon to one that gives them an advantage and immediately hit you with a supereffective move you couldn’t prepare for. Or the fact that all exp gains are after battle, which means that if you do a long battle and Pokemon faints during the end, they get 0 experience, even if they KO 5 Pokémon and dies to the opponent’s 6th.
Are battles faster? Sure. Are they engaging? Not at all. And the game knows this with how much it deemphasizes battles, with wild Pokémon being able to be caught without battles and there being very few trainers in the game. Maybe I’m biased as someone who plays competitive but if the Arceus battle system was adopted in mainline Pokémon games, it would effectively mean the end of competitive Pokémon. Most players would rather sacrifice speed if it meant the battles would still have depth.
Good post. If your primary interest is depth / team building the Arceus system would obviously not be for you.
Obviously removing held items and abilities are the primary way depth is reduced - but I felt like it was appropriate for a single-player only game where catching is the priority. I felt like that priority came first, and the battle system was changed to suit it. Not that they focused on catching because the battles sucked.
Anyway, for me I have no interest in multiplayer, and when it comes to RPGs I am far less interested in team-building and far more in fast, reactive battles. If you can have both, great - Etrian Odyssey is my favourite RPG system. Xenoblade, where almost everything is determined by how you've set your party up before the battle starts, is one of my least.
So, for me, removing held items and abilities was worth it in Arceus. The unpredictability of the turn order wasn't fair, but it was entertaining. Yes, that would certainly make for a poor multi-player game without some tweaking. However I have long argued that the current system in mainline pokemon makes for a very poor single player one. It's fair, but not even slightly entertaining. It is (to me) obviously a 2 v 2 multiplayer battle system shoehorned into 1 v 1 single player, with battles that never even approach the difficulty required to show the depth the series is capable of.
Also, there's at least a little fun in getting inexplicably swept by a Crobat, lol. After 20+ years of pokemon orthodoxy, crazy moments like that made Arceus fun to me.
The turn order is godawful. There's no PvP in that game for a reason
My Typhlosion beats Magnezone with a Fire move, okay, cool. Then my opponent sends out a Ground type and one-shots Typhlosion before I can even do anything. I have zero options to strategize, most trainer battles devolve into each side taking turns one-shotting each other. It's just bad design.
Switching out is sometimes completely safe, but you have no means of knowing when because the game doesn't tell you. This is not only stupid but also wildly unbalanced since faster Pokemon sometimes get the benefit of switching out and attacking for free, which is way too good (hence the lack of PvP, because that's way too abusable).
Legends doesn't have abilities or held items because they're not compatible with this unbalanced mess of a battle system, which strips the game of extra teambuilding options and severely nerfs Pokemon that benefit from their abilities, taking away so much depth
EDIT: Adding on to this, the turn order also completely invalidates defensive Pokemon. Mons like Ferrothorn and Toxapex are excellent because they can sponge hits for days and whittle opponents down with moves like Toxic and Leech Seed. That's their thing, that's what they're built for.
With the turn order, that entire niche is worthless because your Ferrothorn is just going to get one-shotted by a Fire move while you have no means to prevent it at all.
As above, good explaination, fair play.
I guess as this is an S/V thread this Arceus talk is slightly off-topic so I'll stop before this all leads into my biggest hot take with pokemon - that the series will forever be too easy until your party is healed after every battle.
To make it on-topic again, it is cool from a difficulty perspective that you can stumble into way higher level trainers in S/V. Coming up against a trainer with 3 level 38s when you have only lvl 29s will really make you push the status moves rather than just mashing attack. The only shame is that once you realize you're in a high level region you can simply avoid every pokemon and trainer. There are some sections that would have been absolutely epic treks in previous pokemon games, but here once your last pokemon is down to low health you can just say "Okay, I just won't battle until I reach the next town / area".
Feels like a real mis-step not having at least some higher level trainers auto-battle you like previous games to "guard" some areas, so that accessing them then feels like an achievement.
