How Many Pokémon Does Pokémon Need?

18 min readDec 7, 2019

The eight generation of Pokémon games Pokémon Sword/Pokémon Shield(2019, SwSh for short) made the volcano-erupting decision of not having National Dex, which means no Pokémon(mon for short) transfer from older games, but also — for the time being — they will certainly not implement all of the older mon for this generation in any way. Hardware limitations, and the realities of game development makes this a foregone conclusion. Examining the paterns of large game development, a project like this is usually granted only three years at maxiumum, and such projects are usually considered a loss by the executives, even when they bring good money. Since Pokémon is an already cash-cow franchaise with a pretty solid fan base and hard to ruin formula, there is very little incentive for them to grant money just to have largest number of Pokémon possible. Also, how many people actively transfer their mons in the first place? We can bring personal anectodes all day, but the dev team clearly decided that it’s not popular enough to warrant further development. Such decisions happen all the time in game dev, it feels bad when it happens, but no game cannot reasonably cater to every niche, and yes, absolutely needing to have every Pokémon is a niche demand, especially considering the series’ immense customer base who is just looking out a casual, relaxing game to play on the go or as a gift to kids. Furthermore, even if they have been granted abundant budget and time for the development of titles with increasingly growing number of mons, that just means more and more months of stressful labor for the workers. Even on the hypothetical of introducing new mons very slowly, their projects would still grow bigger and bigger, leaving no time for Game Freak to develop anything other than Pokémon. Lastly, bigger projects with bigger budgets do not often result in better creations, on the contrary, it adds more maangement issues, which game companies are bad at by a overwhelming majority. They can postpone the issue, for several generations perhaps, but there needed to be a culling at some point. And it’s actually better that it happened now, as there would be even more mon to left behind later, and the game can have larger percentage of all Pokémon while still retaining a reasonable number.

[caption id=”attachment_1587" align=”alignnone” width=”960"]

All pokemon up to gen 7[/caption]

However, even if devs had the license to do literally as they desire, putting all the mons for the sake of having all of the would not be good. Too much stuff in a game can result in conflicting, confusing, redundant design that overwhelms the player. This happens in narrative too, a story can have too many characters; too many plot arcs; too much tension, too much prose… More does not always mean better. In a good monster-collection game, there needs to be enough mons to make diverse teams, face various enemies, seeing a variety of new mons for each area in the game, and from the perspective of “collecting them all”, there needs to be enough so that a player needs to actively focus on catching to not miss them. However, after a certain point, the amount of mons of starts to become a hinderance. The effort to create memorable mons and make each of them exicting to carry around becomes more difficult as when there are too many mons gives diminishing returns. In short, “How many mons” is an important and interesting question to any mon-collecting game.

But how did the series answer this? For the most part, with grace:

Even with limited colors and pixels, Pokémon designs have always been distinct: The designs routinely shift between cute and edgy, cool and goofy, majestic and down-to-earth, familiar and strange; quickly creating a lasting first impression.
There are a lot of variation for player’s liking: typing, stats, moves etc.
Lots of different catching experiences: fishing, Safari, catching legendary mons etc
The game encourages the player to catch more by creating obstacles and giving out items as reward (ex. needing mons to use moves like Surf and Fly, rewards for catching certain amount of mon)
Exploration is rewarded with new mons, such as getting Eevee from a relatively hidden entrance of a building.

Pokémon got only stronger in those aspects in each iteration, the games have always been vibrant, filled with life and nailed the vibe of spending time with your pes. However, even in its early days, there were looming issues that were going to create trouble when as series progressed.

Redundancy

Let’s use a certain group of Grass types as examples. The 1st gen introduced Bellsprout and Oddish lines. These two Pokémon have quite a few similarities:

Both are Poison-Grass types found in early game
They have nearly identical movesets
Both evolve with a Leaf Stone in third stage
Victrebell has higher base stat total but that becomes equal in later games.
Victrebell has a strong move called Wrap, which becomes trivial in later games.
Bellsprout line is faster and stronger, both more frail.
Oddish line is bulkier and slower
In gen 1, Bellsprout line is somewhat better, but in later generations Victrebell’s speed became more and more lacking for being in a proper fast attacker, and thus Vileplume has became a little bit more useful overall.
Thankfully Victrebell posseses a distinguishable physical attack stat which became useful in later generations and even gained swallowing moves as fun gimmicks, so they have eventually became nearly equally powerful, but still distinct.

The first gen dodges, for the most part, the redundancy problem with having those two lines version exclusives but still has issues which would worsen as series move on.

Both Bellsprout and Oddish lines are weaker than Bulbasaur line, which has not only has the edge of being a starter, and also are better than them in literally every single way.
Gen 2 adds weather meachanics, and some mons are designed to take advantage of Sun. All Grass types can learn Solarbeam, a strong move that normally requires a turn to setup but harsh sunlight weather bypasses that. There are also moves like Morning Sun which gets more powerful in sunlight, both Oddish and Bellsprout lines can learn them.
2nd gen also adds Sunkern line, which is weaker than both of them by a great margin.
Oddish line gains Bellosom as a distinctly sun-oriented mon, but it actually has very little to seperate from Vileplume aside from the fact that it’s somewhat worse with worse distrubited stats and lack of a Poison type.
Gen 3 introduces Pokémon abilities, and so, super majority of Grass types which are not starters now has Chlorophyll, making them faster in Sunlight. This is actually a huge blow to our fellow sun-themed mons. On the other hand, Gen 3 also finally saw a number of more unique Grass-types like Shroomish line.
Gen 4 introduced more Chlorophyll mons, notable in the form of Roserade which is one again better than the turnip and the bell.
Notable in Gen 5 is Lilligant, which is very close to Bellosom in design and role but straight up better.
Bulbasaur line gets Chlorophyll in Gen 5 and a Mega evolution in Gen 6, because why not, just add more salt to the wound.
At least, they have chilled on adding more sun sweeper Grass-types in the end, probably realising too much is too much.

it usually does not get as bad as this case for most other Pokémon, but the core issue remains. For example, early-game birds all have their own quirks, but how many can reside in the same game without feeling redundant?

this is not to argue from the perspective of a specific metagame or way to play a game, but rather when pokemon with very similar niches are in the same game, some just won’t get as much as attention as others. it becomes harder to incentivize using a pokemon and makes obtaining them not exiciting as they can be, especially as power creep becomes more and more appearent. Even if, let’s say, someone wants to have a full grass type team, they would want to have pokemon that does different things. Vileplume, Victrebeel and a host of similar mon just does not differentiate enough, the games so far does not give you a reason to look after a Sunflora, besides the fact that you just want to have that mon in particular.

Developers must have caught the wind of this problem early. Version exclusivity(the issues with them aside) is a way to keep mons from steal spotlight from each other. Bellsprout and Oddish lines are such in Red/Green/Blue/Yellow(1995–1996). Second gen games integrated the old gen as much as they could, but third gen games flat out did not allow you to transfer from older games. Implementation hurdles were the official reason, but it is not implausable to think that perhaps “let’s not steal attention from a brand new batch of Pokémon” was also a motivator. Instead, most older pokemon were relegated to remakes of the first gen games. Even with larger obtainable mon count in Emerald(2004), the attention was firmly given to third gen games. Fifth gen games Black/White(2010) also put some restrictions, it did not allow the player use anything besides the newest mons until post-game; so the players enjoyed a large batch of new Pokemon without conflicting desires of carrying old favourites around. Fourth, sixth and seventh gen games freely mixed old and the new, but as a cost, amount of new mons stayed somewhat low, most notable being only 81 in Pokémon X/Y(2013). These gen games usually gave a new spin to old mons to keep them fresh, with new evolutions and regional variants.

It’s good that SwSh is as it is right now, the redundancy problem is lessened significantly in that game. Yet this alone does not eliminate the issue, especially for future titles.

bellsprout, oddish and exeggute are dancing

Evolutions

As a core aspect of Pokémon, evolution is important to consider in “total mon number”, If done right, it makes the mon growing alongside in your journey all the more exicting, if done wrong, it means lots of dev work that brings little to the game.

Three-stage evolution is good for mons whom player encounters early, two-stage is good for middle game or mon who develops early, one-stage is good for strong or mysterious pokemon. It can be a story unto itself too, such as feeble Magikarp turning into the terrific Gyarados with great patience and perseverence. Different evolutionary branches from one Pokémon is a very economic way to add biodiversity. Clamperl can evolve into two mons with contrasting roles. Evolving Nincada is even a better example, it gives two completely different mons at once. They can also add neccesary power to old lines, mons like Honckrow and Togekiss. Different methods of evolution, even when they are somewhat of a hassle, can bring a unique flavor to Pokémon.

On the flip side, certain implementations can prove truly problematic. Think of mons like Metapod or Kakuna, whose sole duty is to be cocoons for the baby bugs. They are relevant for only a couple of levels, which often amounts to a single area of the game, and are not even that exciting to use in the meantime. GF later addressed this by not having such passive Pokémon as middle stages, even cocoon-like mons are usable and spend a meaningful time in that stage. Even so, when devs decide to add Caterpie line, Metapod needs to come too, the legacy design always bringing devs more busywork.

No legacy design must cause more problems than Nidoran line though. Two Nidoran lines share movepools and abilities. Nidoking and Nideoqueen are just distinct enough to avoid redundancy, but the former stages are not. Meaning adding them, just always means adding 4 extremely similar mon. This is the stuff that goes into the overall count, having to account blocks of pokemon makes the question “Is this line is coming to next game” would be honestly content with a single, generic line of Nidoran that branches into two paths (perhaps justified by a regional form), but that does not seem something devs would ever do.

Sometimes, a pokemon can have too many stages. Especially when mon does not really get propotionally stronger, or not even reaching 100+ in any of its base stats. Fifth gen in particular a bit got carried too much when it came to three stage evolutions. Even as a huge fan of Vaniluxe, I can say that it probably does not really need three stages. This issue was also addressed in later games, evolutionary lines are given considerably sparingly, turns out two stages are usually just ideal most of the time. Alas, this does not mean mostly forgettable middle stages of past lines stop being an issue.

In some cases, three-stage evolutions can be encountered too late, and getting fully-evolved mons can feel like pure grind without any sense of journey or wonder. The worst example could be Beldum line in Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald. It is obtained at level 5, and is quite tough to level up. You only get the mon post-champion, which means every fight worth having has mon at level 50+, making Metang useless too. Thankfully, Metagross is quite powerful, but I don’t think anything would feel amiss if it was just a single-stage evolution.

Still, no Pokémon creates pure busy work as baby Pokémon does, mon whom are added as pre-evoluions to older mon and are often very weak. They are cute and fit well with the introduction of breeding in their debut generation, but have became quickly redundant in ways few other mon truly are, in multiple ways:

Often, the player needs to go out of their way to breed them, with specific items whose sole purpose is to breed these mons. (later they added additonal effects, but not still worth enough to actively pursue)
They are too weak and useless even against lowest level wild mons
Breeding them does not gain anything new like new moves or abilites, and in old gens it actually made you miss certain moves.
Usually mon with baby evolutions are not strong enough to make pre evolution feel meaningful.
They can often be evolved pretty instantly which makes the process of having them in the first place, somewhat moot.
they often look too similar to their parents and said parents already look pretty cute

the worst among them must be Phione, which might take the prize for the most redundant mon ever:

Must be optained by breeding Manhapy, which is not easy to obtain as per mytical Pokémon.
It looks extremely similar to Manhapy, so much that one can be easily confused for another if you don’t exactly remember.
It is not powerless, but it is just a downgraded version of Manhapy, an average Water-type in a world of average Water-types, while you already have Manhapy.
It can’t be used in any fight where strong legendary mon are banned, as does Manhapy, so it can’t enter anywhere the former can’t already enter
To top it off, it cannot be evolved into Manhapy. Hope you have fun with your discount Manhapy.

I am not against the concept of baby mons. Tyrouge is a good one for example, it’s not completely defenseless, and has a function of binding ‘Hitmon’s together, and is actually looks like a child version of them. Mon like Munchlax and Riolu are alright, but something like Igglypuff is truly perplexing. Actually, all of them are okay themselves, just have them be cute in side games, anime or as merchandise, there is little need for most of them in mainline games. Wynaut provides a good case for this argument. On the on hand, it is just a weak version of Wobbuffet and the latter can be found much easier. On the other hand, it is quite adorable and has an entire secret island dedicated to it. This Pokémon is an eleborate joke, and that’s amazing, but the joke is only relevant in RSE. Why not just keep it where it is actually relevant?

Evolutionary stages also overall contribute poorly to enemy variety. There are quite a few fights in series where the opponent just has evolutionary stages of same mon and that is never exciting to face. Even when they are not used in this way, they can be bothersome, for example when trainers have absurdly high-leveled first-stage mons. (Which to be fair, this is an issue with trainer design rather than mons themselves.)

Altrenate Formes

More problematic than evolution stages are the different forms of the same mons. Often, a player will likely use or even able to obtain only one form of the mon at the same time, yet they still neeed to be implemented all the same. Some forms are merely cosmetic changes, like Spinda’s patterns. Some mons change form with an item or a certain activity, gaining different properties in the process, Rotom’s forms for example. Even more complex is when mons change form in-battle, like Castform or Aegislash. Sometimes, the extra work of adding different forms can be equal to just adding two different mons all together. Cosmetic gimmicks are cool and good, but they can just remain in their respective games and not overstay their welcome. Vivilion’s wings were special when we saw it for the first time, but not so much today.

Reigonal forms can definitely cause double work. In Sun/Moon, many mons had Alolan forms as well, radically different from their regular forms. However, because people could transfer those old forms, the old forms needed to be implemented too. SwSh did rightfully away with this, and in the future they can be even bolder in giving old spin to new mon without worrying about ever-growing workload.

What about Mega Evolutions? They are functionally just different forms after all. They are certainly impactful(a detailed discussion of Megas is out of this article’s scope), while they do justify the work to put them in, they might come in conflict with other mechanics. Consider the Dynamax mechanic in SwSh, would Megas also need seperate Dynamax forms as well, as they are technically the last-stage of a mon? Charizard would need three different Dynamax forms. Wouldn’t that overly privilege some Pokemon, even more than it alreaasy does? On the other hand, it would be redundant to have the two mechanics side by side on same mon, likely making the frieshly designed and hyped Max Charizard look weak. The bad thing is, it is even more awkward to just have some Megas but not others, requiring a considerable effort to implement them. As much as leaving them saddens me, that’s the right decision overall.

Effort To Raise Pokémon

While the series is amazing at making the player catch monsters, actually using them later is a different story.

A problem in the past entries was that it was quite a chore to make a functioning team. The games are quite stingent on experience points. It’s impossible to casually train a team of 6, or even 4 or 5 Pokémon just with fighting trainers as the player goes along, they need to hit the grass and grind, which can take quite a while. While the level cap is 100, getting several mons above level 50 is truly a hurdle. Day Care only mariginally helps with this issue, expecially the fact that it doesn’t progress when player is idle. It doesn’t help that most newly obtained mon are often quite below where they need it to be useful, on the extreme you have newly hatched mons at level 1. Adding troubles of teaching them cool moves, the chores of breeding, EV training etc. the games makes it daunting to use lots of different Pokémon save for a section of hardcore players who spend a lot of time on it.

The games did also struggled to give players reasons to use different mons. Despite the characters claiming how cool it is to use lots of various Pokémon, the opposite is true. Raising a single mon absolutely breaks the game. Even on speedruns, where the players avoid fighting as much as they can, the single Pokémon they use can easily go over level 50 by the time they are facing Elite Four. Actively raising more than 3 mons brings very little benefit to the player. It does not help that there are always some high-level legendary mons easily available for service.

However, the series got slowly but surely improved on this. First, series started to offer post-game challenges, like Battle Frontier for example. Tough challenges that makes the player engage in mechanics and build a good team. Later, TMs became reusable, breeding mechanics were simplified, EV training became easier, the game started to be more open about its deeper mechanics. Most importantly since the introduction of team-wide Exp Share in XY, extensive cave bootcamps became a history. Building a party finally became a fun activity, like most other RPGs!

The series gradually introduced more non-battle utility and interactions with Pokémon. Certain more are useful at finding items, catching mons, breeding etc. There are various minigames across the series: Contests, Pokémon sports, berry minigames, various modes where players can just play with their mon like pets.

There are still improvements to be made. For example, the opponents can be bolder in challenging the player. Although, their overall design has considerably improved over the years, the fact that they still get obliterated by the starter Pokémon. Raising new wild mons can be encouraged even further by presenting challenges that requires new tactics to overcome. Wild mon levels and variations can be fine-tuned for a better progression. They can bring back walking alongside your mon from Heartgold/Soulsiver, it could be so nice with the improved 3D graphics.

But, it is incredibly hard to hone the game mechanics when there is an ever-growing amount of mons to be accounted for. What’s the point of encouraging the player when there are just so mons, so many redundancies that most of them will inevitably left behind? Maintaining pacing, level design and competitive balance, making unique visual designs, creating challenges, creating new battle mechanics, managing conficting aspects would be nightmare. Surely they can just dump all mon into wild areas and opponents without any thinking behind it and call it a day, but that’s not peak game design exactly. Even if the devs have limitless resources to put what they want, humans have limited attention and memory span, they can engage with so much content before they are overwhelmed and stop caring. Maybe I am just a corperate shill, but it seems to me that not caring about Pokémon in a Pokémon game is a larger problem to consider than making sure that player will be able to say “I have ALL 900 Pokémon!”

Uncatchables

In Pokémon games, not all of mons are obtainable by in-game means. There are version exclusives, and evolutions which can be only obtained by trade, or doing something which requires online conection. There are also unique mons or regular mons with unique moves only available via events. In the past, and a signifiscant amount of mons were only available via transfering older games. How much of these Pokémon are truly “in the game?”

From the persective of a single-player experiences, such mons are really “social bonuses”, or “extra content packs”, the player cannot really engage with these mons in the single-player, at best encountering them as opponents. This was the sole truth for playing alone in the days before “online”. However, for “pokedex completion” having friends was not enough, those friends should also intend to complete the game, otherwise multiple hardware and multiple copies of games were always neccesary. That’s not enough obviously, the player physically has to be right place and the right time, otherwise say goodbye to those Mythicals. Those requirements got worse as series progressed. Even in these days with online storages, events and methods of cheating; “completing Pokédex” is still expensive and time-consuming chore, especially one starts from ground zero.

There is little engaging about this. It’s not even gameplay, just slowly transfering data. Sure, it’s fun to use cool mons you have trained in the past but if the issue is just collecting mons, the only satisfaction is to have the boxes filled with many, many Pokémon. Collection for the sake of collection, just to being able to feel like “completed” something, and doing the same thing again and again in the every game?.. Why the series should priortize satisfying this feeling over literally any other concern? Frankly, Pokémon deserves better than just being a dull series that exploits such feelings of us.

And when it comes to “Gotta catch’ em all!”, this is the first time where players can reasonably achieve this with in-game efforts, provided they have an internet connection. This is actually “catching” mons, you know, playing the game normally, and having fun, and fair to new players also.

For competitive players? A shake-up like this is amazing for any competitive scene. New things to adapt, discover, less mon to leave behind, and more importantly, everyone has the same material to work. No more worrying about the teams with six Arceus’es from the hell dimension against your local-bred teams; what you get is what you got.

So, How Many Pokémon?

How many mons should there be in a new title? Let’s compare and contrast titles across generations. We will look into single-player available(S), regional pokedex(R), total(T) (Numbers might not be exact, error margin is like +/-15 probably, counting is hard)

Yellow: 137(S), 151(T)
Crystal: 222(S), 251(R, T) but has 100 in Pokédex before the credits
Emerald: 204(S), 202(R), 386(T)
Platinium: 402(S), 210(R), 493(T)
White 2: 434(S), 300(R), 694(T)
Y: 477(S), 153(R), 721(T)
Ultra Moon: 520(S), 403(R), 809(T)
Sword: 370(S), 400(R), 436(T), total includes upcoming Pokémon Home transfers

Pay attention to the difference in S and R count in older games. They correspond to number of Pokémon unobtainable until post game. So they are not only irrelevant for most of thecontent of the game, but also often has very unintiutive ways(a video example) of obtaining that just transfering them might be easier.

SwSh on the other hand, has all 370 available no strings attached. Especially considering the arduous development of the game, it is really impressive, still not falling behind most other titles.

400 overall seems like a very good number. If, let’s say, 100 new pokemon is added in a new generation, then they can rotuinely select and shift 300 old mons, and if devs avoid excessive favouritism, every upcoming came can have large number of wildly different Pokémon.

SwSh seems to left very positive first impressions on a lot of people and the game indeed seems like it deserves the praise it gets. I hope devs don’t back down from the decision of no national dex, it would be truly saddening to future titles lose its vibrancy and fun. Sometimes, less is more.

This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Acelin, Alexandra Morgan, Laura Watson, MasterofCubes, Makkovar, Otakundead and Spencer Gill.