>>44409970Trading's pretty fun if you're into collecting foreign dex entries or just like seeing other players going about their gamr. I usually tend to keep around Pokemon that were nicknamed or given some proper investment (like champ ribbons or higher-than-average levels) for novelty's sake, and try to catch or breed my own.
>>44410127The first few games were single-player oriented. A lot of the game's philosophy and design was taken from games Tajiri grew up with or enjoyed, like SaGa and Dragon Quest, specifically the former in its less linear design, monsters and their complex transforming mechanics, and PP.
It wasn't until Gen 3 when things started to change, with a more linear world, new mechanics like Double Battles being a sell but hardly ever used in RS (besides Liza and Tate all battles were optional and had to be initiated by the player) and later the stats judge in Emerald, invention of VGC in DP, and eventual focus on slowly giving players more chances to optimize stats instead of leaving it to raw chance or 100% perfect grinding. Despite that it'd be wrong to say single player was discarded right then and there, even with the changes Pokemon's tried to add single player content for people to do, like BW2 encouraging exploration and going back to places you've been in the first games, and the side content like Contests, Pokeathlon or the Frontier, all giving players a distinct reward for completing them solo.
