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I have two conditions to buy a Pokemon game: Have all the Pokemon available in some form (excluding event Pokemon, maybe), and have a working Battle Tower worth teambuilding for. That first condition seemed like such a given for each game that I didn't even think about it, and now I wish I only had the second one to worry about. To put it into perspective, I played Y for about 800 hours, just breeding/raising random teams for all the Maison formats. Super Triples was particularly fun for me because it allowed some interesting gimmicks to work pretty well. I streaked past 200 in Y's Super Triples with a team that relied on Water+Fire Pledge, and a Garchomp with a Wide Lens spamming Rock Slide for constant flinches. Just putting stuff like that together and seeing it work was extremely satisfying for me. I excused the removal of triples/rotations in gen 7 because building teams for Super Doubles was still fun for me, and A-Raichu (one of my top 10 alongside regular Raichu) was an absolute star when paired with Tapu Koko. Now, in gen 8, there's no full dex to piece together teams with, and if the rumors are true, the Battle Tower's also nerfed to not have Super formats. I was already not going to buy it (or a Switch for it) but holy fuck, a part of me wants to believe this generation was made intentionally bad so Game Freak will be freed from their apparent torment. The culling may have even rendered simulators unusable to an extent since new TMs/TRs would have made some significant changes to most of the cut Pokemon, and having "expanded" formats would mix gen 7 and gen 8 in a weird, unprecedented way. It's almost impressive how their fuckups are so catastrophically large that even dedicated fans of competitive battling are going to have a hard time picking up the pieces of this shattered generation before they can even think of trying to have fun with it. Good job, Game Freak. At the very least, I can be happy they can't bring the old games down to this level.
