However, something that the majority of Pokemon fans would not enjoy if taken away from the franchise is the battling. With the moral concerns around training two magical animals to fight each other until one of them is unconscious aside, creating a team of strong Pokemon and have them work all the way up to face the Champion of a region is one of the most fulfilling aspects of a mainline Pokemon title. Something that can top that thrill, is when a Pokemon player challenges their friends to a battle, to truly test their team against a non-AI opponent.

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According to a recently dug-up interview from the late 1990s, it seems that Pokemon Red and Blue almost didn’t allow for the ultimate test of player versus player battling. Game Freak Producer Shigeki Morimoto was concerned that battling with friends would be a difficult thing to program in the early Pokemon titles, and “personally didn’t find the idea very interesting.” With interest low at Game Freak, Nintendo stepped in to ensure that Pokemon would have multiplayer battles, as this was something the company wanted in the game. Considering how multiplayer and competitive Pokemon has evolved since the franchise first started, it seems a strange idea that multiplayer battles could have been removed entirely.

It is likely that Pokemon multiplayer would have found its way into the games at some point, due to how both Pokemon and the games industry has changed since the late 1990s. However, it could have also been the case that battles between Pokemon could have been entirely different in a single player capacity too. Game Freak initially wanted Pokemon Red and Blue’s battles to consist of no player input, something else that Nintendo stepped in to change. While fans have always decided how their Pokemon battle, over the years there have been changes to the way the traditional battling formula works. Pokemon Sun and Moon saw no traditional gym battles, for instance. In Scarlet and Violet some fans are hoping that this feature will return.

Even with Pokemon Red and Blue including both battles and multiplayer, the original titles are still different in many ways from the games fans play today. With Nintendo Switch Online planning a Game Boy emulator, perhaps fans will soon be able to experience those original Pokemon games for themselves.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are set to release on November 18, 2022 for Nintendo Switch.

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