What if Pokemon Could Learn 5 Moves?

pokemon can only learn a maximum of four moves it was true when red and blue were released in 1996 and it's still true today in 2022 for those of you who don't know me hello my name is wolf glick and i've been competing in official pokemon tournament since 2011. you can see some of my accomplishments on screen here i've been really interested in some of the theory behind what makes pokemon good or bad it got me thinking what would the game be like if pokemon could learn 5 moves pokemon in many ways is a series defined by its rigidity there's an old adage that if you've played one pokemon game you've played them all and to a certain extent there is some truth to that nearly every main series game features 8 gems for the player to beat culminating in an elite four and champion they're harassed by the local evil team and aided by some of the region's poorly developed characters and their quest to be the strongest 10 year old in the land while specific mechanics differ between games the combat and leveling is very similar no matter which generation you're playing it's a winning formula and game freak hasn't had a strong incentive to really shake things up for a series so known for its familiarity there's actually very few specific mechanics that haven't been tinkered with at one point or another new types have been added the type chart has been altered abilities then hidden abilities were added pokemon can hold items form changes there's a move with two types super powered moves evolution midterm pokemon get big now pokemon fusion and even uh pokemon fusion despite so many aspects of the pokemon experience being tampered with there has never been any experimentation with allowing pokemon to learn an additional move now we can't say for sure why game freak hasn't allowed alakazam to learn an additional move despite its iq being over 5000 but i can at least take some guesses game freak tends to like their new mechanics to look and feel very exciting and flashy whether that's huge z-move animations vibrant form changes via mega evolution or the visually impressive and conceptually confounding dynamax animations that players and spectators notice easily is clearly a priority the reason for these animations being so noticeable is twofold first put simply it's cool sending a wild badoof to an early grave with let's snuggle forever is not only hilarious but it also adds clear and obvious distinction to generation 7 helping it to stand out and feel a bit more unique in a series full of sameness second these central generational gimmicks are a big part of the promotional materials that go along with the game's release i remember being so excited for mega evolution before generation 6 came out and that's in large part because mega evolution looked so new and different and exciting adding a fifth ordinary move wouldn't meet either of these criteria the simple expansion of an existing mechanic would have huge implications on competitive play but also would likely struggle to appear interesting enough to be usable in promotional materials or enticing to players playing through the game of course it's also possible that gamefreak doesn't want to add a fifth move because of what it would do to competitive pokemon wow something tells me that isn't a priority before i tell you what i think i'm curious to know what the general consensus is on a scale of one to ten how much do you think allowing pokemon to learn a fifth move would change competitive pokemon oh also please consider subscribing only about nine percent of my audience is subscribed so if you're watching this video there's a good chance you haven't subscribed yet if you don't want to understand yet i also understand and i'll continue to work on upping the quality until you're convinced anyway back to what would happen if gamefreak let pokemon learn an additional move i've given in a fair bit of thought and if you're looking for a short answer to the question it would be bad after spending a long time with the question i have some predictions on what would likely happen from a competitive standpoint if you're wondering why competitive pokemon is the focus it's because a change like this wouldn't impact a casual fan's enjoyment of the game in a meaningful way in my opinion pokemon isn't exactly known for its difficulty and the addition of a bonus move wouldn't suddenly turn pokemon into dark souls also i'm a competitive player so what actually happens when pokemon can learn a fifth move let's start with something that looks like a positive on the surface when you let pokemon learn an additional move all pokemon will have more moves this means that you can get your pokemon to do more things which in theory sounds fine right what's the problem if my pikachu wants to do an impression of me on new year's day and become a better version of itself there's actually a number of issues by allowing pokemon to become more versatile and how many things they can do at a time but let's start with a basic one pokemon is in many ways an information game you don't know what moves your opponent's pokemon will have until they've revealed them this might not seem like a big deal at first but it's one of the aspects that makes pokemon incredibly difficult to play and what sets it apart from a number of other competitive games in a game like chess both players know exactly what moves the other player is capable of you can't suddenly reveal you've been hiding queen blasts late into the game now imagine playing chess but sometimes the pawns take two captures to remove or they can jump over rooks or maybe they can move two spaces forward every couple turns until you'd seen what a piece was capable of you'd need to be considering tons of options that your opponent might not even have access to in pokemon this most often takes the form of coverage moves moves that are a different type than the user most pokemon and competitive have a standard move pool featuring moves with their type defensive moves and occasionally a popular coverage move to hit pokemon their week two but the moves they normally run are not their only viable options take a pokemon like charizard for example charizard almost always runs protect a fire move like heatwave or blast burn a flying move like air slash or hurricane and solar beam protect helps keep it alive fire and flying are at stab types and solar beam lets it hit pesky water and rock type pokemon that threaten it however let's say you had a charizard that really wanted to beat other charizard you could instead of running solar beam run ancient power and ko other charizard before they knew what hit them or let's say heatran was a real problem for your team you could run scorching sands and not have to worry about heatran anymore this all sounds very exciting from the perspective of the attacker but now consider you're on the heatran side and your opponent has a charizard let's assume five percent of all charizard use scorching sand and if your opponent has it and you let your heatran faint you'll lose the game what should you do should you gamble the game on them not having it and risk the loss or should you play slow and defensively and potentially waste a really favorable match up this guessing game extends to far more than just the moves your opponent has items abilities and evie spreads are all crucial information that pro players gather throughout the course of a set in order to make the best possible decisions going forward and it's not always possible to learn that information before the crucial moments i have two examples to share with you from the 2019 season the last full season we had it's round seven of the world championships and the winner will advance to the final bracket while the loser will be eliminated i'm down a game but in a good position to win game two my rayquaza has an attack boost and is positioned where it can likely ko the rest of my opponent's pokemon but it's the last offense i have on my team i knock out my opponent's incineroar leaving them with only groudon on the field and venusaur in the back but otherwise it must be over what are you kidding me he's dead what is that going to knock out with the mightiest oh my god what oh that groudon has something to hit that rayquaza anyways with the track in this scenario i couldn't afford to slow the pace of the game down or i'd likely lose if my opponent didn't have dragon claw groudon and yet since they had it i lost my rayquaza and was eliminated from the tournament dragon claw groudon was very uncommon at the time but it was my undoing here let's look at a similar scenario from the north american international championships it's the 14th round of the tournament and once again the winner will advance to the final eight bracket while the loser will be eliminated i find myself in a really awkward position against my opponent amungus my electric terrain has expired meaning all my pokemon are vulnerable to falling asleep and i can't get rid of the amungus before it makes me take a nap my opponent goes for what they think is a safe spore into tapacoco but my kyogre the volt switch though going to find its mark onto the mungus still not doing very much because of that weakened power important to allowed for it to fall asleep but we know that it has access to wide guard uh and oh the safety goggles that's a spicy item to have on the incineroar if incineroar falls asleep here i'm very likely to lose the game now safety goggles isn't the most unusual item on incineroar but there's a bit of extra context that's relevant this team was used by both myself and my good friend aaron traylor we both made it to day 2 and i went on to win the entire tournament in the over 60 games we played combined the moment you just watched is the only time throughout the entire tournament that this item activated most of my opponents assumed that incineroar held a z crystal as that was the most common item at the time in other words even if my opponent had talked to every other person that both aaron and i had played throughout the tournament they still couldn't have known that incineroar held safety goggles was it correct for them to not spore in order to cover such a niche option even though not accounting for it ended up costing them the game it's a really hard question to answer i know that was a very long tangent but hopefully it wasn't boring the point i want to emphasize to you is that the more moves you allow a pokemon to have at a time the more this guessing game gets worse with more total move slots you're able to cover wider swaths of enemy teams with fewer pokemon and you can afford to run more obscure moves for specific matchups this would lead to defensive pokemon becoming worse overall with offensive pokemon becoming better defensive pokemon typically shine due to their staying power which most of the time takes the form of good natural defensive stats coupled with solid defensive typing allowing them to resist popular attacks with more moves on each pokemon the odds of a pokemon being hit with a super effective attack skyrocket making it much harder for pokemon to survive on the flip side pokemon with strong natural offensive stats become even stronger if you're a singles player you might think that more offense is a good thing but in my opinion it can make the game really not fun there have been rule sets within competitive pokemon where the defensive pokemon couldn't keep up with the offensive ones and what it led to was an extremely volatile way of playing the game matches could be decided in an instant and a single miss or bad turn might immediately cost you the game i think pokemon is the most fun to play when you need a mix between defense and offense solid defense allows you to position well and gives you some insurance against a single bad turn and making sure you have enough damage output ensures games don't turn into a grindy stall war with a fifth move i fear we would end up in a situation where the defense of pokemon simply couldn't keep up with the offensive ones the one exception to defensive pokemon becoming worse are that some support pokemon might become better the role of support pokemon is to enable their partners rather than to sponge lots of incoming damage they typically use moves like follow me or fake out or can disrupt the opponent with status conditions or screens with an extra move slot these pokemon might become even more annoying one example is togekiss who for a while in 2020 was the premier support pokemon togekiss usually runs follow me air slash and then two of dazzling gleam protect and yawn with an extra move slot togekiss could use all three or it could even run moves like ally switch safeguard or thunder wave allowing players to tailor their egg bird to be as annoying as possible for their specific team as a small note one other thing to think about when talking about a fifth move slot is that it would be extremely problematic with dynamaxx dynamax not only significantly raises the power of moves it also adds a powerful secondary effect to them with five dynamax moves offensive pokemon would be a nightmare to deal with as you'd have to contend with both their coverage and secondary effects being increased i don't think this is a huge deal though because obviously pokemon isn't going to make any changes to sword and shield and i don't personally think it's likely that dynamics continues into generation 9 if that's even a thing if you've listened to everything i've said so far and still think having an additional move wouldn't be so bad i have bad news for you i've saved the most impactful point for last to best explain my point we have to look back a few years to before sword and shield released where for the first and only time in history pokemon fans were mad gamefreak announced that they wouldn't be adding every pokemon to sword and shield and fans were pissed things got pretty ugly but that's not what i'm here to talk about why were people so upset that not all the pokemon were gonna be in sword and shield i think a big part of it was sentimental value a lot of the fans who were upset wanted to transfer pokemon over or catch pokemon that they liked or had some connection with a smaller part of it though was the idea of diversity pokemon has over a thousand different creatures and there's this idea that every pokemon should be special and should be able to be used this mentality bleeds over heavily into competitive pokemon where casual viewers love to complain about how every team uses the same pokemon counter-intuitively the more pokemon are allowed in a rule set the less pokemon are used this might seem strange at first after all why would players choose to use less pokemon when more are legal one reason is because of opportunity cost when sword and shield first came out there were a couple hundred pokemon that were legal and yet it was one of the most diverse competitive formats we've ever seen i was playing against weird pokemon even in the top cut of regionals and it really felt like almost anything could be viable the reason is because the power level of the format was lower if you wanted to use say toxicity you weren't going to be that much worse off than if you were using the best electric type available to you say rotom currently if you wanted to use toxicity the best electric type would be reggie leckie and there is an enormous difference in the viability of those two pokemon in other words the opportunity cost of using a pokemon like toxicity is higher the more pokemon are legal and though toxicity does have some niches and things that set and apart from reggie leckie those niches become less valuable the stronger the opponent pokemon get the power level of a format being higher also makes it much harder for any pokemon that aren't the absolute strongest to shine people love to look at how pacharisu was a shining example of a player using an unorthodox pokemon to do well but pacharisu did well in a format with very few pokemon available and though players have used it since in more open formats it's never had anywhere close to the same level of success pokemon like ursufu incineroar landorus t rillaboom and reggie leckie make any pokemon that doesn't have something extremely powerful going for it very difficult to use in my opinion reggie leckie alone invalidates about 85 percent of all possible pokemon because of its ridiculous speed in conjunction with electroweb so when more pokemon are legal you not only have to contend with the opportunity cost of using a weaker pokemon but also you have to deal with stronger pokemon overall in other words the rich get richer i've told you all of this because it's the exact same concept if you were to allow pokemon to have a fifth move in my opinion adding a fifth move to all pokemon would disproportionately favor those pokemon that were already at the top and make pokemon that were already struggling even more difficult to use let's take a look at some examples to see why landorus tea is probably the mascot for competitive pokemon at this point it's well known widely hated and overpowered it pairs phenomenal offensive typing with a sky-high attack stat a wide move pool and good defensive stats at present most landers run a set of swords dance rock slide fly and earthquake and hold the lumbery item if you ignore landorus or try and play too defensively you risk its swords dancing and becoming a huge threat but if you attack it recklessly you might eat a powerful max move landrus's primary max moves in flying and ground raised its speed and special defense giving it the option to either make its team faster or increase staying power at the moment unless you have a really powerful ice move the best way to deal with landorus is to either bait it into dynamaxing early and then lowering its damage output with intimidate or reflect or to outlast its dynamax and then deal with it in its baby form with the addition of a fifth move landorus could run more coverage moves like u-turn or superpower but it also could run the move protect having both protect and swords the ant would make it way harder to bait landorus into dynamexing early and would also make it harder to clean the ko once its dynomax expired in other words adding a fifth move would allow landorus to neatly cover its few weaknesses making it even harder to take down incineroar is another pokemon that we need to talk about here incinerator is probably the single best pokemon in the game while it isn't going to sweep teams it has ridiculous supporting options thanks to fake out intimidate parting shot and good defensive typing most incinerator sets run fake out and parting shot and then pick 2 out of 3 of flare blitz darkest lariat and taunt having access to both stab moves in addition to taunt allows incineroar to be even more versatile but that isn't the only set it would have to run and sonora could opt around willowisp or burning jealousy in addition to taunt for multiple modes of disruption or it could lead into an assaultfest set with fakeout u-turn flare blitz darkest lariat and close combat as a hybrid supporter and attacker incineroar is similar to reggie lucky in that it invalidates a lot of pokemon due to how powerful it is as a supportive pokemon and giving it better tools to support its team only makes it harder for other pokemon to make a statement we can't speak of the best pokemon without talking about the strongest two right zation is the single strongest pokemon in the game at present and it isn't even remotely balanced brightnessation always runs protect behemoth blade sacred sword and then is forced to choose between play rough to let it hit some problem pokemon harder like kyogre and palkia or substitute which is a very powerful defensive tool that's useful across match-ups lettings asian do both would allow it to not only have one of the most broken moves in the game but also the offensive covers to make it virtually impossible to switch into safely and a safe defensive tool that can quickly snowball out of control if you're having trouble understanding why these moves are more impactful on pokemon like zation or landorus than on a weaker pokemon like say arcanine think about it this way if you wanted to run arcanine right now you would run its four best moves whatever those are and yet that wouldn't be enough to let it perform well so it's very unlikely that the fifth best move on a pokemon that already isn't up to par is going to be the deciding factor in allowing it to shine on the other hand though for pokemon that are already naturally stronger than other pokemon in the format their fifth best move might help them to beat even more pokemon or to improve the few matchups they struggle with and if you're mad at incineroar and landorus this would still happen even without them in any given format some pokemon will be better than others granted some of the pokemon currently legal are way too strong it's fine for some pokemon to be above average but pokemon like zation incineroar flanders reggie lucky gorilla boom and ursufu are far too good compared to what else is legal i personally hope that none of these pokemon make it into whatever the next pokemon games are without serious nerfs though gamefreak really shouldn't allow pokemon to learn a fifth move in my opinion i do think what's interesting though is that in some ways they already have z moves were probably game freak's attempt at allowing pokemon to push back that four-move barrier z moves are unique to generation seven and they were ridiculously powerful once per battle moves that could only be used if your pokemon forfeited its item slot it was an interesting concept but in my opinion the execution was poor because the moves were only used once per battle getting it right felt like a major guessing game as attacking into a protect or a resistance or immunity could be a massive swing and you wouldn't even know if a pokemon had a z move until after it had used it while i hated z moves when we were playing with them i do think that the idea had potential allowing a pokemon to learn a fifth move at the cost of their item slot is really cool in theory but just so difficult to balance in practice gamefreak clearly isn't done experimenting with changes to moves in sword and shield dynamex technically allows a pokemon to double the amount of moves it has access to if you count max moves as different moves than their base moves the reason this isn't overwhelming in competitive pokemon is because these moves don't increase the coverage of the user and because dynamaxx allows a pokemon to double its hp as well giving players a defensive and reactionary tool to handle the increased power to me dynamex feels like game freak trying to better balance the moves by tuning down the power of the moves and adding a defensive component i could be totally off base on that though it's just a hunch more recently we see gamefreak experimenting with another way of letting players get more diversity out of their moves with legends arceus introducing the strong and agile styles for pokemon moves while the legends rc's combat system is very different than a traditional pokemon game i do think it's interesting that the moves are what the game's gimmick revolves around and to me implies game freak might continue experimenting with making moves more dynamic i would be interested to think about what would happen if agile and strong style were adapted for a traditional pokemon game with agile decreasing power and increasing accuracy and strong increasing power and decreasing accuracy i seriously doubt it's gonna happen but it would be interesting from a competitive standpoint this was a really fun video to work on so i hope you enjoyed if you have any feedback on how i approach this video i'd love to hear it in the comments i know i wanted more tangents than normal so i'd be curious if you think that enhanced or distracted from my points thank you for watching and i'll see you again soon

Channel: WolfeyVGC

Views: 368,759

Keywords: Wolfey, Pokemon, VGC, Wolfe Glick, Competitive Pokemon, Pokemon VGC, Pokemon Sword and Shield, twitch, twitch streams, pokemon nuzlocke, nuzlocke, pro gamer, gaming, gamer, hardcore nuzlocke, smallant, ludwig, pokemon challenge, pokemon challenges, alpharad, pokemon moves, pokemon scarlet, pokemon violet, pokemon legends arceus, legends arceus pokemon, pokemon attacks, best pokemon attack, what if Pokemon could learn 5 moves, 5 moves pokemon, 5 attacks Pokemon, pokemon gen 9

Id: WNVj7TstkvM

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022