Ranking Every "Gimmick" in Pokemon.

I had a great chat with fellow YouTuber Moxie Boosted on my new podcast, "The Fridge". Check it out! https://youtu.be/C0JMylsxFlA

I apologize to Dynamax fans. Many don't know that "Dynamax" and the beloved "Iron Jugulis" were actually conceived by the same person. I have just received news that the very same designer has now been promoted to CEO of Nintendo

Everyone knows that the best generational "gimmick" is the addition of abilities back in gen 3. This really shook up the scene and gave way to many opportunities in future games

It’s going to be insane when iron mugulis admits he is actually a future paradox version of you and not sinistea and the came to the present to stop you from becoming him

Dynamax is just scaling up the Pokémon and applying a red filter to them You can do this in blender in a minute

If there one thing that i learned with mario tennis ultra smash and yoshis new island is that nintendo games where the main gimmick is making things going giant are garanteed to stink

mega evolutions are cool in concept but i wish they gave more evolutions to pokemon that really needed it. seeing manectric, medicham, kangaskhan etc. become viable for the first time in decades was really awesome. seeing pokemon like mewtwo, salamence and metagross just get even stronger was not.

It says something about megas that basically the only consistent criticism of it is they gave it to the wrong pokemon. If the extreme outliers (pre-nerf khanga) didn't exist, and they were better distributed, I don't think you could say a bad thing about megas.

#1 : Megaelovution #2 : Softlock Picking #3 : Tera Flying Kingambit #4 : Trading Based Evolution #5 : Pokemon Legends Z moves #6 : Sinnoh HM Slavery #7 : Gen 1 Safari Zone #8 : Dexit #9 : Gigamaxxing #10 : Gen 5 sleep

The one "generational" mechanic that I really like is regional forms. While I still prefer seeing new Pokémon, revisiting an old design and modifying is usually really cool. I think Pokémon feels this way too, given that it's the one gimmick that they continued developing beyond the original gen that started it

Gigantamax forms also had the problem that their unique G-Max moves were either just straight up worse than the normal Dynamax version or completely busted and little in between. Aside from raw power, some Z-moves like Z-Conversion added new and interesting ways to setup certain pokemon at least. The main problem with MEVO is that GameFreak really gave them out to the wrong pokemon that really didn't need a Mega form since they were already popular in the meta in the first place.

The unexpected upside of dynamaxxing being so poor and getting banned from competitive is that gen 8 did end up being just the pure pokemon experience without gimmicks. While gen 8 has plenty of other problems, by contrast you can't really get away from tera in gen 9, if you play the regular metagames you're going to see tera in every game, and it does dominate the game like you say. The biggest point in megas' favour for me is that at least the megas are a known quantity when you queue up for a match. With the others you've got no way of knowing which mon is going to change its type, or get big, or nuke you with a z-move until it happens, whereas you can usually easily tell which mon on the opponent's team is going to mega. You can still play mindgames with it by delaying your mega like you touched on but it feels a lot more manageable and less chaotic than later gens. It feels like each mega is just another threat to memorise and take into account like any other pokemon rather than being an insane wildcard like the gimmicks that came after.

I’m casually watching a jimothy video on my day off when I am jumpscared by my own face 8 minutes and 55 seconds in. I agree pretty much with all your thoughts. I think that everything besides megas is not even that interesting. And megas aren’t even like— done super well conceptually. Too many rich get richer moments, not sure that the item being held is good(it limits power / gives you a knock off nerf, but it feels clunky since they did the next few gimmicks without an item). But the main reason it’s not that bad is cuz they’re just… new Pokémon? It doesn’t have the same sweeping effect on a meta that the universal mechanics do.

Say what you want about Dynamax, but I vividly remember reading comments in a YouTube video showing the anime episode of Ash's Treecko became giant to fight a giant Gulpin. Several comments were asking why we can't fight with giant Pokémon and the reply I saw was "because GameFreak is lazy" and wouldn't put in the effort to do that. This was during the end of Gen 5, right in the middle of X & Y's reveal and release.

I think one other thing to mention for Tera in doubles is that OTS really helps to lower the volatility of it and prevent those “you guessed my Tera type wrong now you instantly lose” moments

Tyranitar (and Abomasnow too I guess) did have some incentive to not Mega immediately: their weather abilities would reactivate when Mega evolving, letting them contest opposing weather or reactivate it after it runs out. Megas are generally disliked more by the VGC crowd because Smogon singles simply banned any disproportionately powerful Megas while VGC players had to deal with the broken ones. But personally I don't see how that's different from for example Flutter Mane being absurdly powerful and making other offensive Fairy or Ghost types obsolete in the same way. GF being unable to balance shouldn't be a point against Megas, because VGC is always going to be very top heavy even without any gimmicks due to the lack of bans. I also see a lot of people saying that already strong mons shouldn't have gotten Megas because then it becomes a rich get richer mechanic, but some of the most broken Megas were for previously bad mons like Kangaskhan or Mawile, and there are plenty of perfectly reasonable Megas for strong mons, best example being Garchomp. GF just showed no restraint when making the ORAS Megas. You can see the difference between the XY pseudo legends Megas for and the ORAS ones, and the big gap between the Mega Mewtwos and the Primals + Mega Ray. It all comes around to GF being bad at balancing even their own official formats, Smogon tiers simply have the advantage of being able to ban overbearing stuff because GF sure as hell isn't gonna stop making them.

It makes me feel great hearing someone else say that Megas are a natural extension of Pokémon.

Every new Pokemon game since generation 6 has had what the fans call a "gimmick".

The only good thing about Gigantamax imo was that Copperajah had a Gigantamax form that could set a steel type form of stealth rocks on the field. Setting up stealth rock, sharp steel, three layers of spikes and two layers of t spikes was funny, even funnier if you managed to win after doing all that.

Dynamax to me will always be "No, son, we have Mega-Evolution at home" I expected nothing for Gen 8 and I was still disappointed.