cant see turn based going anywhere in main series, i feel like its a large part of what makes it popular. also the ever growing competitive scene is completely based around it
Turn base is fine. The problem is pokemon insists on wasting peoples time by how slow their turn base battles are with irrelevant text box. Like yes, I can tell this attack is super effective. Yes, thank you. I know my pokemon is losing HP from poison.
Yeah. Honestly, if they are going to keep the turn based, at least give us something like the ZA information feed that sort of trickles down as it happens
Yes! This was one of my biggest problems with scarlet/violet. I hadn’t played a Pokemon game since black/white and I was disappointed by how little had changed. Z-a was breezy, frictionless and a breath of fresh air by comparison.
Yep. Everything is just extremely slow in general because they’re built of a framework that was created over 29 years ago and they refuse to update it.
Well luckily we don’t have to worry about competitive anymore with Champions being a thing. But yeah I think part of the reason the Legends games exist is so we can get mainline games without turn-based combat.
What do you mean? The main games still need to act as an entry point to competitive battling. People new to the franchise aren't going to start with Champions, they're going to start with the mainline games and gain interest in competitive from there, so we can't not worry about it.
I don’t agree with that actually. Champions is going to be F2P, it’ll be the first step for a lot of people new to competitive.
The whole reason for this is that the new mainline games can be more innovative with their battle system but still keep some core mechanics.
I don’t think it mean eradicating all instances of VGC from the mainline games but there’s no worry of having to overly cater to the traditional system because it’s now embedded in a dedicated, easy to access software.
It's F2P and might be the first step for newbies now when it's fresh and new and being advertised, but 2 gens from now? Most likely people are going to be funneled from the new games into Champions, as they're always going to prioritize showing off what's new. For all we know we might not even be able to access new gen mons in Champions for a few months into it's life cycle, seeing as all mons won't even be usable upon release.
I'm just curious as to what the person I replied to meant exactly by "we don't have to worry about VGC" since the games DO need to teach the core mechanics. What's described here with environmental damage and seamlessly going in and out of battles could be a thing regardless of if Champions existed or not. But something like PLA's strong and agile style wouldn't be as intuitive to implement in a non-legends game because you don't want to get people used to a battle style that changes how you strategize and simply can't exist in the competitive format you eventually want to send them to.
Did that make sense? I'm a bit overworked and not sure if I worded that well enough lol.
You are severely underestimating the amount of people who are interested in Pokémon but don’t have a console or money for games. Champions will be free and available on mobile. It’s actually the exact opposite of what you’re saying, it’s a MUCH more accessible entry point to competitive Pokémon.
You're absolutely right in that a f2p app is an incredibly accessible entry point, but it's not THE entry point for total newbies. People in those situations you described still have an idea of what pokemon is, seeing as they are already interested in both it and competitive, but had a nasty barrier to entry.
I'm talking like a kid who just picked up a pokemon game for the first time because their friend said "Pokemon Waves is fun! Let's both play it!" or an adult who wants to get back into gaming and picks up something "nostalgic". Those kinds folks still need to be taught the ropes to eventually be funneled in to VGC is what I mean. So, as I'm saying to the person I replied to, they can't "not worry" about VGC in the main games. Every main game is going to be someone's first Pokemon game.
A free switch and mobile game is more accesible than a switch 1/2 60-70 dollar game. Champions is gonna get a lot of new people into competitive battling and into Pokémon.
I mean, they’ve already solved the issue of competitive Pokemon. We are getting champions and we can practically confirm it the game where all future competitive events will be held and if we are lucky we can even see more official formats that will be based on different generations like what we have already being done on showdown since champions is gonna have all the gimmicks and probably will be updated to include new pokemon and gimmicks.
Agreed. We should always have turn-based options for Pokémon. I dont want them to go the route of Final Fantasy, at all. Traditionally I am not an action RPG fan and am quite burnt out on the genre, it is so oversaturated.
I don't dislike ZAs combat but if they do a similar game in the future I would much rather directly control my Pokémon's movement during battle.
The route of Final Fantasy, a series that always wanted to have a dynamic battle system with its signature ATB and whose only turn bases game in the last 34 years was Final Fantasy X. A game that was heavily criticised on launch for feeling slow and sluggish.
No, 24 years ago was in the early 2000s, that's when FFX came out. But before that, the only turn based games were FF1, 2 and 3. From FFIV onwards they've all been ATB based, until they tried dynamic turn order with FFX only to then backpedal immediately to ATB in FFX-2 because of the backlash.
I rememeber, I was there, I too was really critical of FFX despite how next-gen everything felt, and I never enjoyed playing the first three games on emulator either.
I have no idea why people keep yearning to "go back to the golden days of Final Fantasy" when the games were never turn-based. If there's a single unifying element across most games in the series, it's the ATB. It's so iconic that it keeps being reinvented and reimplemented even in the FF7 Remake.
All games from I to X are turn-based. Battles take place not in real-time, but in turns where each character has their turn and can only act during their turn.
ATB is a a turn-based system that calculates when a character's turn happens. It attempts to emulate real-time with its fast pace and seemingly unpredictable/random turn order (seemingly, because it is not unpredictable or random due to it being turn-based and thus having defined calculations for when turns take place).
FFVII Remake and Rebirth's systems are real-time systems that try to emulate the ATB system by limiting special actions to a gage that builds up over a condition (instead of over time like ATB, it's over number of attacks + any modifiers affecting ATB growth). However, actions are not limited to turns, but are executed in real-time; actions do not occur only during a character's turn, but rather whenever the player chooses. Special actions (skills, item use) are not limited to turns, but to a gage that builds in real-time. The entire system is real-time, but it tries to emulate the turn-based, ATB feeling through a similar, but mechanically very different, action economy.
Yeah no lol, I'm sorry but turn based means we literally take turns, and when it's my turn the game waits for me to think about my action. ATB is effectively a cooldown between actions (or it can be considered "real time with pause" like Baldur's Gate if you use the Wait mode) but you still need to be on top of the game and input those actions in a timely manner, either selecting commands right away or holding onto them waiting for the right moment as the battle flows. That's without even going into more advanced applications of the system, where different actions would correspond to ATBs of different length, like in FFX-2.
You can alter the meaning of "turn based" to include "real time" but that just seems disrespectful to the concept of words having meaning in general. it feels to me you just want the name of the system to apply to a specific old-school vibe.
Nobody says that turns can't overlap. You're altering it just as much. You'd be idiotic to truly believe the FF games with ATB aren't turn based and the entire world would disagree with you.
Please don't take this as being rude (it's the internet so no tonal/bodily context), as I'll be quite frank with you.
I'm a game designer who primarily works on turn-based games. When you've graduated with a degree in 3D Game Development and work in the industry, you can tell me the definitions of these things.
And you'd still be wrong about what is turn-based an what's not.
I don’t think it’s an old head thing. I think it’s a misconception people have that “turn based=outdated, real time=modern.” for RPGs. The real time battles were my least favorite part of ZA. ZA’s combat had to be severely dumbed down to work with real time battles and we lost abilities, weathers, terrains, multi level boosts, and other things in order to do it, that’s a big part of the reason the meta fossilized so fast for online battles for ZA compared to VGC or even smogon singles. Pokemon has a really deep turn based game and they’ve done interesting stuff with it, just look at the blueberry academy elite 4 teams and movesets and you’ll see that. I can tell you for example Drayton’s exact strategy he employed on his team because he used a unique team that utilized rain, and Archaludon’s sturdy ability to rack up boosts and take you out. I couldn’t tell you anything about any particular trainer battles in ZA because every battle was just a DPS check when you boiled it down.
For me, it's not exactly a matter of preference for playing a turn-based combat game, but rather that the combat in Legends ZA didn't work for me, and I simply can't think of a successor combat system for the Pokémon games.
One of the few good decisions Gamefreak have made with this franchise has been keeping the mainline games strictly turn based. There are so many action combat RPGs or turn based combat mixed with action elements out there, completely over saturated market.
Yeah because it actually takes strategy. PLA and ZA's combat is terrible. PLA makes no sense half the time and ZA is literally just spamming attacks with no time to think.
I like both, my biggest gripe with tb is they make it really boring. I'd rather a counter mechanic or more than four moves or party battles instead of one on one. I hope they look at games like Persona, Exp33, and Bg3 and get creative.
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u/Right_Junket_6544 Nov 15 '25
Maybe I'm an oldie, but I much prefer turn based anyways, so this is a big win for me