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So I was playing Gen I Random Battle on Showdown when I really started thinking about the state of Pokemon in Gen I and the state of it now. And I realized that the biggest difference, and it's a broad difference, is in the options.
Mechanic changes have happened every generation, but more than anything else, more Pokemon are added. More moves are added. Already existing pokemon learn more moves, by level-up, tutor, or breeding, or whatever. In the first generation, there were so many limitations presented by the number of available pokemon (that, for the post part, had different roles from their peers, like how Magmar worked versus Arcanine or Ninetails) which made things pretty simple and predictable. Pokemon may have one or two different popular sets, but because of how sparse moveset options were, it came down so much more to which Pokemon you used instead of which moves you wanted to teach it. And then Gen IV had the Physical/Special split, which suddenly turned Pokemon like, say, Gengar, into entirely different battlers now able to use their STAB to the fullest potential.
I'm not saying that predictability and limits are a bad thing for the meta, in fact I love how creative and expansive movesets can be now. But having SO many pokemon with SO many different moveset options makes eventual outclassing of previous pokemon inevitable, the infamous power creep. Competitively, it can be so hard to make a team that is 100% solid with no cracks in the foundation, because it's impossible to prepare for everything. But maybe we're not supposed to. The simplicity of early battling is great and fine to pine for, but the sea of diverse, creative options we can put together now (especially in Doubles, where gimmicks are everywhere) is its own wonderful thing, too, despite its flaws. It's almost like the modern metagame isn't an evolution of the first generation, but almost like an entirely different, separate system just hiding beneath the same shell.
Thoughts?
