It’s hard to believe the Pokemon’s Global Trade System has been around since D🐼iamond & Pearl, and it’s even harder to believe that, des༒pite how trivial they’ve been for 15 years, we’re still dealing with version exclusive Pokemon. They don’t encourage trading with friends the way they did when Pokemon first started, so why are they still here?
I enjoyed version exclusives when I was a kid. Before the internet and Bulbapedia, it was fun to discover new Pokemon you’d never seen before while trading and battling. I remember my classmates fawning over an Electabuzz and thinking it must be the most exotic and rare Pokemon in the game. I started farming them in the Power Plant and trading them to all the Pokemon Blue players for whatever I could get. Version exclusives made sense back tꦓhen, and as I learned more about the way the system worked, it informed my decision about which version of each generation to buy.
I think a lot of people still choose the version they play based on the exclusives, even though it doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Trading has been trivialized by the Global Trade System, so getting the version exclusive Pokemon you don’t have access to, at least the💫 non-legendaries ones, is more of a chore than anything else.
For the new Scarlet & Violet DLC, version exclusives really feel like an afterthought for Game Freak. Just six Pokemon across four evolutionary lines are version exclusive in The Teal Mask; Aipon, Gligar, Ambipom, Gliscor, Cramor𒀰ant, and Morpeko. Unless you’re really trying to catch ‘em all, I’m not sure why anyone should even care.
Given how easy it is to get the Pokemon that aren’t in your version, it probably seems like a rather trivial thing to complain about. I don’t think about version exclusives muꦯch. These days I prefer to be surprised about the Pokemon I encounter in each new game, rather than look up which ones are version exclusive and choose which one I play based on that. But for competitive 🅺players, version exclusive Pokemon actually create a big issue.
At this year’s Pokemon World Championship Series, a rash of VGC players were disqualified when it was discovered they were using hacked (or genned) Pokemon. It has always been against the rules to use modified or generated Pokemon competitively, but the Play! Pokemon organization has started cracking down on players, meaning they’ll have to be a lot more careful about where they get their Pokemon f🅺rom.
Some of the players that were disqualified claim their hacked Pokemon came from people they thought they could trust not to trade the illegal Pokemon, and the org is recommending that competitors avoid trading alꦗtogether in order to ensure their teams pass inspection. This seems to be the only safe solution, but it means that anyone serious about playing Pokemon would need to buy two copies of every game and play all of them to completion multiple times in order to get the version exclusive Pokemon with the stats they’re looking for. Version exclusive Pokemon create an unreasonably high barrier to entry to competitive play, particularly now that it’s become so risky to trade.
I had hoped we’d turned a corner when Legends: Arceus did not launch with two versions, but Scarlet & Violet was an unfortunate return to the status quo. The mainline Pokemon games are long overdue for some quality-of-life improvements, and if it were up to me, version exclusives would be at the top of the list of things it's time to get rid of, especially if Pokemon cares about having a healthy competitive environment.