Competitive Battling? Eck.

Personally, and this might be just me, but I think competitive battling ruins pokemon entirely. The feelings you had growing your pokemon and travelling with them through your journey is completely worthless once you try to battle online. I think the company didn't want to enforce this kind of thing in-game, because they haven't really done anything for it until now with the EV training.

Let me explain quickly what I mean:

On the beginning of your journey, you start with your first pokemon, a choice of three, fire, water, or grass. You feel ready to take on the world, ready to go and beat up a specific type of wild pokemon so that you've trained your specific stat high enough so you're better than every other pokemon of that species in that aspect!

Wait...what?

See how incredibly stupid that sounds? The pokemon games are more or less about the journey, having different experiences with your pokemon. I get it that they tried to make all pokemon different than one another with the IVs, and that's fine. The EVs is where I have a little bit of a problem, though. The gist of it, in my point of view of playing a lot of mmos, you fight one type of creature to "level up" one of your stats. Your stats can level up to 255...oh but wait, you have to split it evenly between 500 or so points. Yeah, ok. That'd be fine if the way of getting these points wasn't so annoyingly weird.

Like I said before, you need to fight a specific species of pokemon to get an EV point for that stat. What's tedious and frustrating about this concept is that to max out a stat you need 255 points. That means that you need to knock out 255 of the same pokemon over and over, which means grinding overload. Some pokemon give 2 EV stats, but that's still a whopping 127.5 pokemon you need to grind on. This is just for one stat as well. Then you have the restriction of only having 500 or so max ev points to spend between 6 stats? Hopefully things change in X and Y, where EV training is to be simpler.

Now for my next point, the tiers...**** the tiers, I'm just gonna get that out of the way now. I hate them, they're absolutely annoying. I absolutely love this quote from one of the Elite Four:

"Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites. I like your style. You understand what's important. Go on—the Champion is waiting." -Karen

Now those are words to live by in the pokemon world, if you don't understand what it means, then...well, you should. It's pretty simple. Anyways, pokemon aren't tools, they aren't weapons in mmos, where you throw away the weak ones and older ones simply because you found new ones that are better. They're your partners that have been with you through thick and thin. If you had a dog, and that dog had been with you for most of your life, would you simply trade it away for another one simply because that dog could do a backflip? no, that's selfish.

Tiers place pokemon into separate boxes, ones that are good, and ones that aren't. Alakazam and Dragonite are examples of OU(Overused) pokemon, who are used all the time simply because their stats are better than all the others. Absol and Sableye are two examples of pokemon that were grouped into the other tiers, UU(Underused), RU(Rarelyused), and NU(Neverused), they might not have god-level stats, but they're far from being useless! I know there might be different things about how the system works, like Alakazam is in OU because it IS used more often, but that's because of selfish people who like to have an edge over others! If some of the lesser-known pokemon were used more often, and the assholes selfishness wasn't a part of it, then the game would be much more fun. Think to the anime, does everyone use the same pokemon because they're better than others? NO! They use the pokemon they grew up with, and they didn't care if they lost or not, they had FUN. That's what I think everyone has lost a sense of, they think winning is fun, and they forget that losing can be just as much fun if the battle was fun.

Just as a little...flavor text, I'm going to show you what I see when I watch competitive battles:

Stealth rocks, spikes, spikes, protect, spikes, switch, switch, death fodder, substitute, setup move, setup move, sweep, sweep, sweep, swee- BZZT ERROR ERROR PREDICTABLE MUCH?

I don't want to drag this on much longer, but you can see the point I'm trying to get at. I'll take all your hate comments to heart, because I want to see your opinions and maybe you can sway me that competitive is a good thing. BTW. This basic message can be placed into every game in the history of everything. Competitiveness is basically the desire and need to win, and it's not fun, which is what games are supposed to be about.

Surprisingly I agree with you. Whenever I play a pokemon game I play it for the adventure and the training and the battles. I particularly love it when I beat the Champion for the first time and even though I know what his/her pokemon are I still use the same pokemon I beat him with the first time as they are the team of six which I fought with through thick and thin. That is the team which I beat the Leagues with  and I love them. Also a point which was not mentioned before, Why do so many competitive battlers use Legendaries so often. Alright they are powerful but to be honest. I never had to transfer,Trade or use Action Replay to form my winning team which beat all five leagues. Overall I agree with Jinkei.

I think it depends on the person, Some people play it for the battles which if you do so i recommend downloading the hacks that have increased gameplay. PErsonally i like both aspects and wish the battles were slightly harder but on an over all scale i agree, I play more for the adventure and the story than the battles themselves and as cyrus said i also always stick with my champion beating team ^^