LogFAQs > #978982810

Karovorak posted...

Pokemon Stadium 2 had all the nerd information available in some classroom thing.

Reading that was enough to make 11 year old me the pvp king of school.

No idea how we were supposed to learn that in gen 1. Probably bit by bit by some NPC dialogs.

Yeah Stadium 2 had some pretty good movesets on a lot of pokemon too. Stadium 1 to a lesser degree. They obviously knew Amnesia Mewtwo was broken enough to be suitable as a final boss all by itself but there's still a lot of jank I'm not sure they were aware of. I don't think there's any explanation of EVs and IVs (or stat exp and DVs, whatever) anywhere in gen 1 / gen 2. And even if there were an explanation that it exists, there's certainly no explanation on how you should optimize for it.

It always kinda surprised me that even back then they were clearly somewhat aware of how the metagame should develop for competitive battling. But there was absolutely nothing in RBY or GSC that encouraged you to think about it even a little bit. Like they spent all this dev time designing minmax properties of pokemon knowing less than 0.1% of players would make anything of it or even know it's there. Even the Battle Tower in Crystal is easily brute-force-able. So it's only until the Battle Tower in RS and to a greater extent the Battle Frontier in Emerald that they really threw a bone to the super nerds to use the system they built.