Here's the thing. Sword and Shield shat the bed for a lot of reasons. The graphics were super umderwhelming, the map design was simplistic at best, and the game being split in DLC chunks shrouded by downright misleading marketing makes me pensive to reccomend it as a single player game to many.
THAT BEING SAID, I find that competitive high level multiplayer Pokemon to be a deep and fun game, especially when you play double battles. When you play doubles it feels like a fancy creature chess with lots of mechanics like speed, stat buffs/debuffs, abilities, items, and the multitude of interaction between them. Is this unique to an RPG? By no means. But it is impressive with just the sheer amount of content that the game has added over the years it's really demanding to the player to utilize the numerous tools and mechanics the game has while at the same time needing you to be cognizant of what the enemy is doing at the same time.
Gamefreak has not been great at balancing in the past, but it feels like they are getting better at it this time around. While a huge number of features see focus to doubles such as Dynamax, Decorate/Coaching, Expanding Force, and Stalwart/Propeller Tail, Pokemon has for a very long time had a huge focus on doubles (redirection, protect play, Helping Hand, all since gen 3). The game is just fine in singles but for much more fair, competitive play Doubles Pokemon is actually really fun and has quite the skill celing.
Double Battles Pokemon is actually good
It annoys me how they make specific moves, abilities and even Pokemon that are focused around double battles but then they barely put any double battles in the single player
next game should be like Colosseum and have all double battles
Same here. I hear GF doesn't want to confuse simpler audiance and complicate the main quest, but I absolutley agree it's way under utilized in the main story and single player experience. It would not be as much of a problem if Pokemon's main official pvp format is the one that's swept aside in its own game. Even Temtem did this correctly to take advantage of doubles and familairize it with players.
Can't you just use smogon if all you want is online comp?
I want Triple Battles back. Synergy moves, like those Pledge attacks, and party buffs would be nice too.
I tend to find the VGC meta while less controlled than Smogon tends to be more fun than singles. Plus while I would never recommend using Dynamaxing in Singles, for Gamefreak's ludicrous mechanics Dynamaxing is actually a fun way to play doubles since the volatility of Pokemon and the number of Pokemon that can move in a turn is much more numerous and variable.
Plus real talk I dont like Smogon's ban decisions for the most part.
Yeah Smogon is retarded, crazy obsession with the concept of team archetypes being viable and demand for meta to be status heavy
I don't get WHY they haven't come back yet
Yeah yeah I know GF likes to rotate features to keep the games "fresh", but there's NO way it returned in Gen 6 for no reason and then THAT'S when they decided to boot it.
Its not like it would destroy the framerate like it would in Gen 7 (and pretty much still did in Gen 6), Raid Battles have up to 9 entities on screen at once (4 players, 4 Pokemon, Raid Boss) and it runs just fine. And shit like Howl now effecting your entire side in Raids and Double Battles and Life Dew would be perfect for the format.
We’ve known all of that since at least gen 5 user, the only issue here really is what said, not enough doubles-centric content in main story. I like what they do in recent gens in making some of the boss battles double battles but I feel like Emerald and Colosseum had a better approach overall.
Smogon is controlled by players who believe spamming ridiculously safe moves every turn is peak skill.