“Welcome to the world of Pokemon!”
For years this has been the familiar greeting to each installment of the Pokemon franchise. Since the very beginning, aside from catching them all, Pokemon has been about trying to build the strongest team you can.
One of the factors in building these teams was the IV, or Individual Value, mechanic. Individual Values are what make each Pokemon unique within a species. For example, two Pikachu’s will very rarely have the same stats, this is because of each Pikachu’s Individual Values. One of the Pikachu’s may have a higher Speed Individual Value making it faster, while the other may have a higher Attack Individual Value making it hit harder.
However, competitive field changed once the breeding mechanic was introduced in Generation 2. This mechanic allowed trainers to breed two Pokemon together to create a low level Pokemon with characteristics from both of the parents whether it be moves, or more importantly to the meta game IVs. For example, lets take the two Pikachu’s we discussed earlier, the Speed IV Pikachu and the Attack IV Pikachu. If you take the two and breed them together you will eventually get a Pikachu with BOTH a high Speed and Attack IV.
This brings us to our main point of discussion, Poke-genics. That is the recent trend of breeding perfect IV Pokemon for competitive play. Rather than being used to differentiate Pokemon IV’s have now become something of a measuring stick. That is to say only Pokemon with 5 to 6 out of 6 IVs have become the only viable Pokemon in competitive play. So the IV Mechanic has been transformed, rather than being a way to make every individual Pokemon unique, IVs have become a standard to which all Pokemon must conform too, or be rendered effectively useless.
This mechanic has tainted the game in a way. Rather than being a game about catching a team of your favorite Pokemon and growing attached to them by training them in ways that compliment their unique attributes; Pokemon has become a game of competitive Eugenics where the winner isn’t the one who has learned the best way to train a team according to its strengths, but who has better bred a cookie cutter set of Pokemon that has been determined to be the most viable.
So, if it were up to me, how would we go about fixing this? I’ve devised two solutions. The first involves making bred Pokemon weaker. One way to do this is to limit the number of perfect IVs that can be passed on. So instead of allowing 5 IVs to be passed down via the destiny knot, you make it 3 and force the other three to be randomly generated. You could also limit the natures available to bred Pokemon to the neutral ones, forcing players to choose between 5-6 perfect IVs or 2-3 perfect IVs with the chance of one IV receiving an additional boost from natures.
The other way we could address this is by strengthening unbred or wild Pokemon. The way we could achieve this is by guaranteeing a minimum of 2 perfect IVs in the wild, as we’ve seen implemented in the Friend Safari, and also making Hidden Abilities exclusive to wild Pokemon. That would mean that passing Hidden Abilities via breeding would be made impossible.
So my final thoughts?
Am I a fan of IV breeding Pokemon?
Would I like Gamefreak to address this situation?
Yes because it hurts what I believe was the intended purpose of the mechanic
Will they do anything about it?
Probably not considering the direction they’ve taken this Generation in making IV Breeding easier.
-MB
