During 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:last week’s ♌Pokemon Presents s💯howcase, it was revealed that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Legends Arceus is set to introduce a welcome change to the series’ longstanding and criminally outdated battle system. While gimmicks like Megas and Gigantamaxing have been regularly added for two decades, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon’s core battle system 🐻has remained largely unchanged since 2002’s Ruby & Sapphire. As a 🤡result, it’s refreshing to see Game Freak finally attempting to shake things up a bit - to headbutt the tree outside New Bark Town, if you will.
Pokemon: Legends Arceus is implementing an all-new take on combat with its introduction of two distinct battle styles: Strong Style and Agile Style. The former allows you to hit harder at the expense of speed, whereas the latter is designed around executing multiple techniques in quick succession to get the jump on your opponent. Given how intriguing this is, at least concep🀅tually, it’s disappointing to learn that Legends Arceus will reportedly not feature a competitive scene. However, somewhat strangely, these alternate styles have been part of the Pokemon TCG for 🅷three successive expansions now, the most recent of which launches today. While they’re not necessarily new to the trading card game, their inclusion in Legends Arceus makes them retroactively - and currently - all the more fascinating.
It’s worth noting that the battle styles used in the Pokemon TCG bear slightly different names from the ones in Legends Arceus. Instead of Strong Style and Agile Style, the trading card game opts for Single Strike and Rapid Strike - 🐎also, Rapid Strike Urshifu is even meta in the games at the moment, being the Pokemon that initially introduced this kind of combat to Sword & Shield in its Isle of Armor expansion. Even if they’re not exactly the same, the similarities they do share are worth extrapolating, particularly when you consider how ambiguous Legends Arceus is at present.
Pokemon has been in desperate need of innovation for well over a decade now. While Legends Arceus is not a numbered entry in the mainline series, it is worth noting that spin-off titles are often where Pokemon’s most prominent experimentation occurs. For example, Let’s Go is the be🔯st Pokemon game in over ten years because of how it successfully led to actionable improvements in Sword & Shield, whereas Mystery Dungeon proves 𒈔that Pokemon is actually capable of telling half-decent stories. Meanwhile, 🅠168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Go is arguably the game of the century and New Pokemon ജSnap proves that theౠre are no bad Pokemon. I love canonical generations as much as the next person🔯, but h🔯aving grown up with this series ever since I first booted up Pokemon Blue as a four-year-old eejit, I can see where the genesis of its excellence actually lies.
Let’s pivot back to fighting styles. “You’re reading into it too much!” I hear you shout. “It’s just a card game mechanic!” It’s fine to consider it like that, if you so choose. You’re a grown up, probably. You can♍ think for yourself, hopefully. But! - and this is a large but, as evidenced by the exclamation mark and further compounded by this ostensibly unnecessary but actually-very-important-so-shut-up explanation of emphasis - this is an excellent sign for the future of Pokemon. As I mentioned earlier in this piece, this is a series that has been living off dwindling dividends when it comes to combat. It is a series that is in dire need of the kind of inventiveness that initially established it as the RPG behemoth it has become. Splitting combat into two distinct styles might seem minor - negligible, even. But, as is always the case w🥀ith this specific sort of Pokemon game, it is an experiment, and regardless of whether an experiment is a success or explodes in your face, it will always lead to a valuable lesson.
We probably won’t get to actually learn said lesson until Legends Arceus launches in January - again, the TCG uses similar styles, not the exact same ones. Still, studying how this new form of combat has been adapted for the trading card game gives us more of an insight into what’s to come than just about anything else. Alongside demonstrating the newfound dynamism it brings to the thick of battle, this split highlights how essential it becomes to reexamine individual - and sometimes previously overlooked - Pokemon as a resuꦗlt of their revamped hybridity, or lack thereof. ‘Mons who were origin♏ally deemed as competitively worthless can instantly become viable in the blink of a Sableye, as proven by the likes of Rapid Strike Octillery and Single Strike Houndoom. It completely reinvents the game by doing barely anything at all - it’s magic.
If you, like me, are excited to see how Pokemon: Legends Arce♏us shapes up the series on January 28, do yourself a favour and check out the new Evolving Skies TCG expansion that launches today. As well as playing with different fighting styles, it’s packed with Eeveelutions and Dragon-types you can add to your collection - really, though, the style split is what is truly important here. It’s been 19 years since Pokemon made a proper, actionable change to the way magical creatures talon-punch and claw-kick one another - just less than two decades later, that is finally about to change.
