Current Events > Has a single Pokemon game after yellow given you a rival who...

(+) Yeah! (+)

Actually changes his team based on how you perform against them? Or for any reason at all?

It's just fucking wild to me that they never touched on the idea again after all this time.

I think Sw/Sh's Hop changed his team once after he gets pounded by a cute boy.

Honestly, I had a great idea for this.

Give us the easiest opening rival battle of all time. Portray the rival as a kid with absolutely no confidence in himself and his adventure is trying to fix that. Make it almost literally impossible to lose to him. Im talking, if you don't run out of PP on growl, there's literally no way to lose the fight.

But, if you do manage to throw the fight, you give the kid a little bit of confidence and unlock the route where he turns into a fucking menace.

Every encounter from that point on he has a stacked team and will absolutely be head and shoulders above every trainer and Gym leader you fight.

But if you beat him normally he's basically another competitively lobotomized Pokemon rival, like Hop.

I mean it was a cute idea but kind of silly to tune endgame difficulty based on actions the player took in the first 30 minutes >_>. Let alone his Eevelution was based on one possible Pokmon you'd have out of six lol.

I think a fun way to do it would be to have a relatively open progression with branching routes, (like the second half of Johto or the middle of Sinnoh) and depending on the route you took, your rival would take a different route, and therefore catch different Pokemon

how is that great

Kim_Seong-a posted...

I mean it was a cute idea but kind of silly to tune endgame difficulty based on actions the player took in the first 30 minutes >_>. Let alone his Eevelution was based on one possible Pokmon you'd have out of six lol.

His team types don't really change though. He has either a Cloyster, Ninetales, or Magneton with an Eeveelution replacing its respective type.

It's not really all that different from your rival picking the starter that's strong against yours, you just obviously have only the one starter. I don't think it was meant to be a way of changing difficulty, it was just a replacement for that.

Is he the only rival that replaces one? He loses the Raticate. I don't know enough about Pokemon to know if he's unique in that.

That rival could also have different locations based on performance.
If you keep beating him badly, he tries to jump you at more inconvenient times.
If you play badly though, he'll show up after you've healed or he might just be standing around letting you initiate the fight.

I like the idea of having different rivals with different mechanics instead of only different personalities.

Don't like the idea of the team based on performance since we tend to be driven to win, and it's not like we get curb-stomped in Pokemon or have anything super difficult.

What I do like is maybe have their team based on those random questions that usually have no bearing. Like "What Pokemon do you like in your team?"

"Strong ones!" -> self-explanatory
"My favorites!" -> weakest
"Both kinds!" -> average route

"What is most important in battle?"
"Speed!"
"Attack!"
"Defense!"
With the answer affecting the rival team or their EV spread.