Given its proximity to the launch of Pokémon Sun & Moon, the start to the 2017 season of the Pokémon International Championships over the weekend has been a rather interesting one for fans of the game. Just a few short weeks have passed, and those looking to compete will have had to assemble a new team of Pokémon in a brand new game, trying to find the most competitive combinations with which to do battle.
The UK’s Ben Kyriakou (on the left in the above photo) made it through to the semi-finals, and speaking to him after the competition had finished, I was curious if that changed how he played Sun & Moon for the first time, potentially spoiling how much he was able to simply play for his own enjoyment. “I guess so? I don’t really play in game very much, and to be honest, I might actually trade off all the stuff I’ve used in the tournament and give it another run through to play it properly. I didn’t go and really blitz it, and I took a bit of time to just play it, so it was OK.” He added, “There was so little time before the tournament that you had to kind of focus on the tournament more than playing the game.”
Over the course of a three day event, anyone that wanted to could enter, first going through a swiss round – an interesting format in which you’re guaranteed a certain number of games, but are matched up against other players with a similar win-loss record up to that point – and then into a series of elmination rounds. As you can imagine, it was the usual faces that rose to the top, using their general Pokémon gaming expertise to create and use powerful teams of Pokémon.
By mid-afternoon on Sunday, it was all down to the grand final, with many of those who had been playing sticking around to support their friends and countrymen through the last few stages. Each Pokémon knocked out was met by cheers from a Spanish or Italian contingent in the crowd – those supporting the British players in the final eight were stereotypically subdued.
Ben Kyriakou (left) playing against William Tansley in the quarter finals.
Pokémon is a fascinating series to contemplate as a competitive game, I feel. It’s really here and in this context that you can see how well Pokémon stack up against each other, how well they’re balanced. Like the short 5-8 hour romp of a first person shooter campaign, you don’t need all that much finesse and thought to make your way through the single player of Pokémon games, and can easily approach every battle with a brute force approach.
Competitively, more defensive tactics and Pokémon can come to the fore. The final between Miguel Marti de la Torre – the eventual winner – and Nico Davide Cognetta saw two teams, both with a Gastrodon and Celesteela included. The second game in the best of three format was a torturous stalemate with these two Pokémon on both sides. Leech Seed, Recover, Protect and Substitute were the order of the day, grinding down the clock – a cry of “F*** you, Gastrodon!” greeted one of their departures to some laughter from those nearby.
“I love the sight of those two,” Ben countered, cutting against the grain. “My team deals with them really well, but I didn’t play so well against Miguel [the eventual champion] and I probably should have won it, but he played what he needed to play. […] But if I made it to the finals, that Gastrodon would have been dying quite hard, I can tell you that much!”
Competitive play like this uses the double battle format, with both players fielding two Pokémon at a time and having just four to switch between. It really opens up the tactical options and aims to keep the game flowing – yes, even when it’s a dull stalemate – as players make use of the various strengths and weaknesses of the elements to counteract certain strategies. I like to think of this like watching Chess masters in a battle of wits, compared to popular FPS and MOBA esports which rely much more on twitch reflexes and thinking and reacting quickly.
Ben said, “If you’ve played through the game, you kind of know that this is this type and you know that Thunderbolt is super effective on water types. The videogame is quite an easy thing to just watch on a casual level, but at the higher level there’s a lot more depth to it, that if you get into the competitive game and start playing, you realise just how much thought goes into every turn and how people have built their teams.”
He continued, “Because you make you moves at the same time as your opponent, you don’t have that kind of information game that you do with Chess, but it is very definitely a mental game. You have to think and concentrate and, well, get it right!”
What’s going to be interesting is to see how the tactics and teams evolve over the next year through the various local and regional championships leading to the World Championships. Even just within the core Pokémon from the game, there’s bound to be new approaches that appear and new ideas to combat certain team make ups.
“The metagame has accelerated very quickly,” Ben said, “so people have taken a lot of time to play games, and that obviously helps because the more you play, the more you know what’s good and what’s not. It’s going to be interesting to see, now that we’ve got some time before the next tournament what happens to the metagame and where it goes, but I think it’s still got a lot of development to do.
“And when Pokémon Bank is released in January, there’s a lot of other things that become obtainable, which will change everything again!”
