User blog:Agent Derp/Pokemon as a MOBA

A wild blog has appeared!

Well thinking is rather dangerous, and one day (today in fact), I was thinking about the battle system in Pokemon which in my opinion is outdated. A lot is based around luck which is something I detest. Anyway I somehow got the idea of Pokemon in a game like League of Legends. Wierd thing is the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to write itself and fit together wonderfully like a jigsaw puzzle. If you are familar with the mechanics of Pokemon, then you may understand, if not then I'm not sure if I can explain well.

Each Pokemon can learn up to 4 moves. Each champion in LoL has 4 abilities (Q,W,E,R). In Pokemon, some moves are just there for damage, some lower the enemy's base stats, some raise the user's base stats, some moves put hazards down on the ground, some moves heal health, some moves help an ally. So you can imagine that there are a great variety of moves in Pokemon. A twist for Pokemon, is that Pokemon can replace a move with a new one. So Torchic can replace Ember (a weak fire move) with Flamethrower (a much stronger fire move), or replace a completely different move like Agility (increases Torchic's speed) with Will-o-Wisp (burns enemy, causing them to reduce damage dealt and does damage to them over time).

Each Pokemon has a passive ability. Each champion in LoL has a passive ability. Some Pokemon can have a different passive ability, for example Torchic can have either Blaze or Speed Boost. Speed Boost is built for turn based battles but can easily be tweaked to adjust to real time. So from increasing the base Speed stat by 50% every turn, it can be something like the user increases their attack and movement speed by 20% every 5 seconds it is in combat, stacking up to 4 times.

Each Pokemon has base stats in HP, Physical Attack, Physical Defence, Special Attack (basically Magic Attack), Special Defence (basically Magic Defence) and Speed (which decides who moves first in a turn). Very similar to LoL. Speed is designed for a turn based battle system, but can be adjusted to real time by splitting it into movement speed and attack speed.

From looking at this, it's very easy to imagine a Pokemon taking the place of a champion.

There are some mechanics that can be brought over from the Pokemon RPG games. Type matchups for example. We all know how that works, Fire weak to Water etc. It means that no one Pokemon can dominate all and you must put thought into team compositions.

Another big Pokemon mechanic I thought of. Evolving. I got to this idea when I thought about which Pokemon you would choose in champ select to fight. I thought it would be weird if you could select either a Pikachu or a Salamence in champ select and then they would have to be balanced somehow. It sounds rather ridiculous to fight a Salamence as Pikachu and not get owned like you should do in the RPG. So I thought about when you select a Pokemon in champ select, you start off in their lowest stage of evolution and evolve as you level up through the game. You want your powerhouse Salamence? Well you have to start off as a Bagon and get up 50 levels. Upon thinking more about this, I found an extremely weird coincidence.

Basically there's not much of a balance in individual Pokemon, but you have to create a team to beat any Pokemon that comes your way, concidering type advantages and all that. Anyway for the super powered Pokemon, like Salamence, you need to train a lot to get to it. So start off at Bagon, at lv 30 you evolve into Shelgon, then at lv 50 you evolve into Salamence. In comparison to something like Butterfree, a much weaker Pokemon than Salamence, it evolves much much earlier. So train Butterfree's lowest form, Caterpie, to lv 7 to evolve to Metapod, then to lv 10 to Butterfree. For more comparison lets choose the Charizard family. So Charmander to lv 16, Charmeleon to lv 36 and you have a Charizard. Salamence is generally a stronger Pokemon than Charizard and Charizard is generally a stronger Pokemon than Butterfree. Yes Salamence is the strongest of the lot, but only late game and if it reaches that late game. Bagon will have to deal with Butterfree and Charmelon early game and have a bad time against them because it's much weaker than them. Then late game comes and Salamence is a monster to both of them. So in a wierd coincidence the game balances out, like Vayne vs Caitlyn. One sucks early game and a monster late, the other strong early and meh late.

The only things I'm not sure on is what to do with minions. I don't know what substitutes Pokemon can do for minions and Pokemon have to level up somehow. Maybe they can be replaced with Rattata and Bidoof.

Also legendaries like Mewtwo are unplayable, for obvious reasons. Though they could be used as jungle monsters like Dragon or Baron.

Nintendo really ought to think of a Pokemon MOBA spin off, it's a genre that is growing in popularity and Nintendo don't have any feet in it right now. Pokemon would fit extremely well in this genre and still remain loyal in style(?) to the main games.

If tl;dr I don't blame you. I wrote a lot here.