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Characterization Through Mechanics: Pokemon Battles

POV: DESIGN.  DIFFICULTY 3.  LEVEL 1 - 1 POV: DESIGN.  DIFFICULTY 3.  LEVEL 1 – 1

Characterization through mechanics essentially involves writing stories where the events and characters abide by a set of rules that are clearly defined and consistently applied. Clarity and consistency are important for any well-told story, but for characterization through mechanics in particular, we can take these rules and calculate the inner workings of characters and actions and even predict what will happen in new scenarios. I can’t think of a better case to examine for characterization through mechanics than the Pokemon TV show!

In the early seasons back in 1998, the show introduced me both to the world and mechanics of Pokemon. I used the lessons learned from the show, the Gameboy game, and the card game to deepen my appreciation of Pokemon. Now the show’s battles ignore the rules established by the games and the earlier seasons of the series. I have seen few battles with such an egregious disregard of mechanics as Scraggy vs Simisage and few battles uphold the RPG video game mechanics as closely as Sawk vs. Seismitoad (watch it here).

“Alright, Sawk. KARATE CHOP! … It’s fast! What’s up with that speed.”

Richard: Now the Pokemon trainers in the show often tell their Pokemon to “dodge” incoming attacks. Dodge is not a move in the Pokemon video games. KARATE CHOP is a move from the games and one that Sawk learns. Marcus, what’s the data for KARATE CHOP?

Marcus: It’s a move that you won’t see in any serious Pokemon video game competitive meta. It’s basically the Fire2 of the Final Fantasy series. It’s not bad, but why would you use Fire2 when you could use Fire3, or in Pokemon terms, why would you use KARATE CHOP when you can use CLOSE COMBAT. Since Ash and his crew are in a state of arrested development there is no telling what leg of their Pokemon journey they’re on. If they are mid-adventure, KARATE CHOP would be a sensible move to have and use.

Richard: In the video game, Karate Chop has 100% accuracy. So unless Sawk rubbed his eyes with some sand or Seismitoad covered itself with bright powder, it’s clear that the show is taking a bit of creative liberty to build drama in the scene. What is accurate to the games is that Seismitoad’s ability, swift swim, is no joke. In the rain swift swim doubles the speed of the Pokemon. So in the rain, swift swim Seismitoad can outspeed even some of the game’s fastest Pokemon.

Marcus: With the help of our handy dandy Poke-calculator we can take a look at the extema and compare. The slowest Seismitoad could outspeed the fastest Sawk in the rain. So no matter what speed values these Pokemon happen to have, any speed Seismitoad can outspeed any speed Sawk. The episode and the game line up again.

Richard: Sawk takes a DRAIN PUNCH to the face because he is unable to use the universal Pokemon show move “dodge it.” He doesn’t look too hurt because DRAIN PUNCH is a fighting type move and therefore Seismitoad doesn’t get a damage bonus because it’s a water-ground type. Also the power of DRAIN PUNCH is just 75 which is generally pretty weak. The best part about this attack is that the attacker heals back half the damage it dishes out. In Seismitoad’s case, it hasn’t been hit yet, so it had nothing to heal.

Poor Seismitoad. The MUD SHOT attack it uses has an accuracy of 95%. There was only a slim chance Sawk could dodge the shots, and the show reflects this lucky maneuvering well. You can see the surprised expression on Sawk’s face too! Seismitoad’s trainer isn’t a very good battler. The drain punch move was a questionable choice, but MUD SHOT has even less power at 55. What’s great about MUDSHOT is, if it hits, the target Pokemon’s speed is reduced. But Seismitoad is already faster than Sawk! Why would he need to use a risky and weak move to continue to be faster!?

Marcus: The LOW SWEEP the Sawk then lands next makes our calculations interesting. LOW SWEEP lowers the target’s SPEED stat by 33%. That speed drop allows Sawk to then outspeed Seismitoad. So what range of SPEED values would allow this to happen? The aforementioned fastest Sawk vs the slowest Seismitoad would fit this scenario easily. Sawk’s 295 SPEED vs Seismitoad’s modified 180. If you’re looking for a little more nuance in the stats, with some simple calculations we run calculations on anything but the slowest Seismitoad possible. In this scenario, Seismitoad can have a SPEED rage of 137-222!  Or a modified range of 180-295. What spread! Like I said before, doubling the speed stat is no joke. I guess our trainer was so confident in his speed in the rain that he didn’t bother to invest in Seismitoad’s speed at all.

Richard: I’m sure Edmund, the trainer in gray, is a wanna-be fighting Pokemon trainer. After his Seismitoad gets hit by the LOW SWEEP, he follows up with a BRICK BREAK, another relatively weak fighting type attack at 75 power. In general BRICK BREAK is a neat move because it has the power to break through the defensive psychic barrier moves REFLECT and LIGHT SCREEN. If you haven’t noticed, Sawk is not a psychic type and there ain’t no screens in this battle. In the Pokemon games, each Pokemon can only learn 4 moves. Seismitoad has revealed 3 out of the four. If Seismitoad’s last move isn’t a water attack, then its trainer completely fails.

In the next scene, the show really starts to take creative liberty with time. The pokemon video games are turn-based with all players making their moves simultaneously (not knowing the opponent’s moves). After getting hit by LOW SWEEP, Seismitoad “cheats” and takes a quick turn to land a BRICK BREAK. I don’t even know how to interpret the scene where both Pokemon continually strike each other with glowing hands. What attacks are they using? How many turns are they taking? Oh well, it sure looks cool.

Marcus: Assuming Seismitoad has max defense and Sawk has max attack the damage dealt thus far to Seismitoad is:

  • LOW SWEEP: 26.6-31.5%
  • Random Punches: ??? (let’s ignore these)
  • Attack boosted (+33% damage) CLOSE COMBAT: 73 – 85.9%
  • The range of total damage 99.6. – 117.4%

So the estimated range in damage the random punches 99.6 – 117.4% making the KO by Sawk possible according to the video game simulation.

Richard: This battle stays pretty true to the Pokemon game mechanics. Sure Seismitoad dodged a move, but we can consider “dodge it” to be the equivalent of the video game move PROTECT, which prevents all damage done to a Pokemon for a turn. Even though Seismitoad stole a turn with the MUD SHOT + BRICK BREAK sequence, Sawk stole it right back with the BULK UP + ClOSE COMBAT finisher. Yes, the Pokemon video games don’t allow players to steal turns like this, but plenty of RPG battles systems do. Radiant Historia, Bravely Default, and even Final Fantasy 10 allow players to see or manipulate their turn order in various ways.

We ran this battle scenario in Pokemon Showdown, an online battle simulator that emulates the mechanics of the Pokemon video games with perfect accuracy. It turns out that MUD SHOT miss was important for Sawk to win. If he got hit, Sawk would have taken damage and had his speed lowered for a double set back.

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Difficulty I Choose You

POV: JOURNALIST.  DIFFICULTY 3.  LEVEL 1 - 1 POV: JOURNALIST.  DIFFICULTY 3.  LEVEL 1 – 1

Game difficulty is hard to discuss especially for games like Pokemon. In this video Speedster presents a top 10 list of the hardest story battles in the Pokemon RPG series. Speedster’s video interests me not because of what he had to say about the difficulty design of Pokemon, but because he struggles to frame the discussion of difficulty. He opens with this:

“why are some battles just really hard?”

“I know that most battles in RPGs in general are really easy if you just grind levels and quite hard if you don’t grind levels.”

Speedster attempts to pin down the variance in the player’s Pokemon and items by stipulating that the notional player uses properly-leveled Pokemon for each battle. I assume “properly leveled” means that the player’s Pokemon levels closely matches the opposing Pokemon’s levels.

Speedster struggles to describe the conditions that make many of the battles in his top 10 difficult. Sometimes the opposing Pokemon have stronger moves. Sometimes the challenge is due to a Pokemon type disadvantage because of the availability of catchable Pokemon. Sometimes the lack of Speedster’s offensive strength increased the effect of random moves like METRONOME, SMOKE SCREEN, or DOUBLE TEAM from the opposing team. Basically, when he couldn’t KO the opposing Pokemon fast enough, his opponent had time to set up a some nasty situations.

“I only won with luck”

Throughout these descriptions Speedster doesn’t articulate how challenging the battles are in a consistent, objective, or measurable way. Instead he gauges difficulty generally by describing opposing Pokemon strength, the number of times he retried the battle, how frustrated he was, or if he had to leave the gym to grind a few more levels.

“I never had to.. reset and try again or go off and grind without losing. Easily the hardest champion for me.”

“I have never gone through this gym without at least a few of my Pokemon fainting”

The Pokemon battle system design space is massive and allows for an incredible diversity of strategies (read more here). For games like Pokemon, I’ve found that difficulty spikes occur not because the challenges gets much harder in a linear way; it’s not because the designers all of a sudden make the difficulty curve steeper by simply adjust one variable like enemy level. Rather it’s because the challenges start to require players to explore specific parts of the design space and use specific counter strategies. These challenges push the player to take advantage of elements of the complexity and depth of the game that they had been previously ignoring. For these battles, general strategies used previously will not be effective.

“[The Norman Gym battle in Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire] is a huge spike in difficulty curve”

Speedster didn’t describe using any boosting items, like X Speed or X Defense. Maybe he’s used to competitive battling where items are banned, so he chooses not to use such items in the single-player story battles. But trading for Pokemon and using items in battle is a legitimate part of the single-player game. This is a clear case of a player making challenges harder for himself by not exploring all the options available to him. I don’t blame Speedster. I do the same thing when I play Pokemon. Not only do such choices make the difficulty design of the game harder to grasp, but it makes talking about the difficulty of these challenges even harder.

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Exeggutor Space

POV: PLAYER.  DIFFICULTY 2.  LEVEL 1 - 1 POV: PLAYER.  DIFFICULTY 2.  LEVEL 1 – 1

This video showcases a unique strategy that revolves around the Pokemon Exeggutor and a rare ability called Harvest. This ability is only found on 5 grass type Pokemon and it lets them consume and regrow Berry items. In the video the Berry chosen is the Petaya Berry which boosts a Pokemon’s special attack when consumed. After seeing the strategy in action, I laughed. I gasped. I pondered why I haven’t thought of it before, and then I laughed again. But if you’re not familiar with Pokemon, you probably don’t really understand what’s going on. There might be this gap preventing you from relating to my excitement or the creativity here.

To illuminate the mystery of creativity and conveyance, I’ll explain why this Harvest + Exeggutor strategy is creative and why it’s so difficult to convey to those unfamiliar with Pokemon and its metagame. To do so I’ll touch on the game design topics of complexity, design space, and nuance.

Whether you’re familiar with Pokemon or not, you should know that the Pokemon handheld RPG video games are very complicated. When I say complicated, I mean there are a lot of rules. Even if we just focus on competitive battling (ignoring all single player challenges, secrets, etc.) we’re talking about hundreds of Pokemon, hundreds of attack moves, half a hundred held items, a handful of variable stats, and a few abilities per Pokemon. There’s a lot of individual rules to learn that come together to make billions of combinations.  

To help organize all this data, it’s helpful to think in terms of the design space, which is a way of organizing all the stuff in a game. In this case, we’re specifically looking at the design space of competitive Pokemon battling. By looking at the big picture and how all the battle rules combine, we see new patterns and groups. For example, fighting type Pokemon generally have high physical attack. Makes sense, right? Also, special (non-physical) fighting type attacks are rare and tend to be inaccurate or weak. That’s good to know. Knowing this pattern, if you see a new fighting type Pokemon you can make a few safe assumptions. Recognizing what is rare, uncommon, and common across the entire game helps players make more informed decisions against the staggering (billions) unknown possible combinations.

Even after seeing the big picture of the design space, there are still dozens of complexities to learn per category. Competitive battlers first learn the moves that seem most powerful or that are most frequently used in competition. As part of a communal learning environment, it’s hard to go against the trends of what’s popular/powerful as the strategies the community prioritizes will be the ones that are refined over time. After all, it’s these strategies that have the most thinkers and testers working on them. And whatever rises to the top of this priority list generally does so because it’s effective in an obvious way that most people can understand and use.

from bulbapedia Bulbagarden  from bulbapedia Bulbagarden

There are many reasons why I haven’t seen the Petaya Berry Exeggutor Harvest strategy before:

  • Exeggutor has some pretty big weaknesses to popular Pokemon and popular moves. Being a Grass-Psychic type, Exeggutor is 4x weak to bug attacks not to mention 2x weakness to Dark, Ghost, Fire, Ice, Poison, and Flying type attacks. U-turn is a popular Bug type move that’s on many non-bug type Pokemon. And most teams have some kind of Fire or Ice attack to deal with other annoyingly strong Pokemon like Ferrothorn and Landorus.
  • The more popular Grass type Pokemon are Venusaur, Breloom, and Ferrothorn.
  • The few Grass Pokemon with the Harvest ability often use a berry that recovers from a status effect or heals back HP instead of the Petaya Berry which raises special attack. Gaining HP is much more directly and obviously related to winning battles than raising special attack. Even with raised special attack, if Exeggutor switches out for another Pokemon, the boost will be nullified. Gained HP is never reset. Healed statuses are never reset.
  • One of the most popular user created formats for competitive battling features a “sleep clause” which limits the number of Pokemon a player can put to sleep on their opponent’s team. This clause works against Grass type Pokemon the most as they cannot use the move Sleep Powder as often as they would want. Sleep-inducing moves are rare within the entire design space of Pokemon.
  • The strategy requires the teamwork of two Pokemon: Emolga and Exeggutor. Exeggutor is too slow on its own unless it gets the speed boost from Emolga. The more Pokemon and steps to a strategy, the more potential weak links in the chain.

FROM BULBAPEDIA BULBAGARDEN  FROM BULBAPEDIA BULBAGARDEN

Each of the reasons detailed above is the result of thousands of players who chased power and thus defined the overused, popular options. As the community seeks and refines the powerful and popular strategies, all other strategic possibilities are implicitly categorized as less powerful, less obvious, and less effective. In other words, it’s the complexities that get ignored or overlooked that become nuanced.

Keep in mind this sorting is based on what seems powerful. All the overlooked, nuanced Pokemon, moves, and combinations may still be effective, but they’re simply off most players’ radar. The nuanced possibilities therefore surprise us so much more when they turn out to be effective. And for games like Pokemon, surprise and unpredictability are powerful. It takes someone with a vision, or inspiration, or enough luck when throwing random things together to show everyone just how powerful the overlooked and the unexpected can really be; and how much room for novelty and diversity there is within the design space of Pokemon battling.

When I see the Exeggutor strategy begin to fall into place, my entire understanding and history of Pokemon is brought into a sharp focus, reminding me that though I’ve competed at events, explored the worlds of each game, and even dreamed up my own Pokemon games, that there is still a grand possibility space to explore between all of the known areas I’ve charted. Seeing Exeggutor dominate takes me back to 1999 when I retooled my team in Pokemon Red by replacing the Venusaur I had since the start of the game  with an Exeggutor because I noticed Exeggutor’s superior special attack strength. I changed my whole team and strategy because I noticed one detail in a sea of options. Despite all the trends, I decided to go in a different direction, while I huddled over a Prima strategy guide searching for my own unique way to be the very best.