>>56173700If you play a bunch of other games in the raising monsters subgenre or even pokemon romhacks that becomes apparent. A lot of Pokemon's base design is weird for the genre. It doesn't get discussed a lot but the whole genre exists due to storage limitations for save files. Back in 1987 Namco wanted to make a big splash in the RPG space by releasing the first full color fully textured 1st person dungeon crawler (Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei). Everything prior (Ultima, Wizardry, Hydlide) was either 16-color or less, or used wireframes. This also meant they had to include tons of highly detailed animated sprites of first-person views of monsters. All of this necessitated them having to use a big cartridge and not being able to afford a battery backup for save files, MT1 uses a password system. So how'd they do it? The monsters don't level up or have XP. You get new monsters by fusing the old monsters. This means you'll never be using your starting team at the end of the game, it'll always end up being replaced by some mix of demons you recruit late game and rare demons that are hard to fuse.
So basically mon-raising games exist because Namco had to find a way to copy Wizardry's create your own party gameplay on console without being able to keep stats/XP in the save file for a 6 character party. That series pretty quickly went to save files and monsters leveling up, but the balance stayed the same, and it's mostly the same in the entire genre.
Except Pokemon, Pokemon has always also taken inspiration from the digital pet genre, so they can't just have you disgarding your old mons at the end of the game to catch godmons like SMT does, but the side effect end up being 80% of your cast is non-obvious shitmons and things that seem like shitmons like Ralts in Emerald are borderline must catch mons.
I appreciate Pokemon for what it is, but it's lame that people have to think up challenge runs to use half the mons.
