The Brilliance of Pokémon Go Battle League
I think many people I know would be surprised if I told them that the most fun I have ever had playing Pokémon Go was in 2020, at the height of the worst global pandemic in one hundred years. It is natural to assume that Pokémon Go, an augmented reality game which revolves around in-person player interaction and exploration of real-world locations, would not fare well during an international crisis that forced billions of people indoors. My enjoyment of Pokémon Go in 2020 stemmed almost entirely from a game-defining new mode that was added early in the year — Pokémon Go Battle League.
For the longest time, it always felt like something was missing in Pokémon Go and the release of Go Battle League, a dedicated competitive player vs. player (PvP) battle mode, filled that void for a large number of diehard players. For many Pokémon fans growing up, the appeal of Pokémon came not from catching them all, but from being the very best and proving your worth as a skilled Pokémon trainer. Go Battle League, which pits random players around the world against each other in 3v3 ranked battles, provided many players with a chance to revive their childhood competitive spirit and relive fond memories of overcoming the toughest trainers to reach the top.
I believe that the release of Go Battle League and the exponential growth of the game’s PvP community is undoubtedly the best thing that has happened to Pokémon Go since it came out in 2016. There are so many things that Niantic, the developers of Pokémon Go, did right with the addition of PvP in Pokémon Go, and it is a miracle that a company specializing in AR was able to implement such a unique and innovative take on Pokémon battling for the game.
Now that Go Battle League’s one year anniversary has passed, I feel that there is a lack of appreciation for the mode which rejuvenated Pokémon Go for so many players. Although many players like to point out the flaws with PvP, it is equally as important to acknowledge the magnitude of Niantic’s achievement in bringing this mode to life and reflect on what makes Go Battle League and PvP so brilliant.
Low Floor, High Ceiling
The PvP system in Pokémon Go is not difficult at all to learn, making it friendly for new players. You can literally explain how it works in under 30 seconds because there are only four mechanics:
(1) Tapping the screen continuously unleashes fast moves, which generate energy and deals a small amount of damage to the opposing Pokémon.
(2) Energy is used to activate charged moves that inflict a large amount of damage by tapping the corresponding button on the bottom of screen once the move’s energy requirement is met. You will then be pulled into a mini-game, similar Fruit Ninja, where you swipe bubbles — the more bubbles you swipe, the more damage the charged move does.
(3) Before an opponent unleashes a charged move against your Pokémon, you have the option to shield to negate all damage taken. This can only be done twice per battle.
(4) You can switch to another Pokémon in your party. Switching has a 60 second cooldown.
Although Pokémon Go’s PvP mechanics look simple on the surface, the decisions that are forced upon the player in battle adds a deep level of strategy and complexity to the game. For instance, players might have to weigh the pros and cons of expending a shield versus saving it for later in the battle or determine an appropriate time to switch along with which Pokémon to switch into. Even before the battle starts, players are also tasked to make pivotal decisions such as assembling a well-rounded team, ensuring each Pokémon has the right moveset, and selecting which Pokémon will be sent out first.
Navigating through these strategic interactions intelligently comes only through experience and regular practice, along with active study of these facets of the game. In fact, the standard of excellence could not be any higher today with many players now having thousands of battles under their belt in Go Battle League. In addition to having a rich understanding of the fundamentals, many players are learning and taking advantage of advanced tactics to get the upper hand in battle. A good example of this is the sacrificial swap, which involves switching into a resisted Pokémon right as the opponent queues a charge move to take less damage and waste the opponent’s banked energy. Simply put, the PvP player base is collectively getting better and new players need to learn quite a bit about the inner workings of the game to catch up and even reach moderate skill ranges (e.g. 2,000 ELO rating).
Ultimately, Pokémon Go PvP is easy for anyone to pick up and play with its simple and intuitive design, but learning the game’s small nuances and tricks make it an extremely difficult — yet rewarding — game to master. The sheer depth of PvP is something that I absolutely adore because it means there is room to constantly grow and get better, and the PvP community’s shared ambition to improve is what makes Go Battle League so competitive. As you get better and face more skilled opponents, individual battles become increasingly more intense to the point where initiating an action one second too late can mean the difference between winning and losing. These battles are exhilarating, and the rush that you get from winning a tough battle is what keeps you coming back for more.
A Fresh, New Twist to Competitive Pokémon
Despite its differences, Pokémon Go PvP is still Pokémon at its core. Although there are many differences between Go Battle League and the main series games, the essence of Pokémon’s RPG roots shine bright in PvP and Go Battle League never feels out of place as the franchise’s newest competitive Pokémon experience. For PvP, many key aspects of Pokémon were either translated over directly (e.g. Pokémon typing) or adapted for Pokémon Go without compromising the unique strategic gameplay that made Pokémon so popular in the first place.
There are a lot of things that positively distinguish PvP in Pokémon Go from the main series games:
Real-time Battling
Normally, Pokémon is associated with turn-based combat where players have all the time in the world to think ahead and plan out their approach to battle. In Pokémon Go, players have absolutely none of that. PvP is 100% in real-time, forcing players to make decisions in the moment. Thinking on the fly, having to rely more on my instincts and learning how to make decisions under pressure were skills that I needed to develop to be successful in Go Battle League, and I am grateful that Go Battle League gave me the opportunity to play Pokémon in a way that enabled me to hone these skills.
Additionally, real-time battling is perfect for mobile since it ensures that matches can be completed quickly, usually in around 2–4 minutes. This makes Go Battle League easy to pick up, set aside and play on the go, which contrasts the main series games where a match could exceed over 10 minutes.
A Vastly Different Competitive Landscape
The RPG elements of Pokémon Go are considerably stripped down to make the game more approachable for a more mainstream and casual player base. Many features from the main series games are absent — Pokémon do not have abilities, there are no non-damaging moves, no weather conditions. The list goes on and on. Several aspects that successfully carried over to Pokémon Go, like base stats and move pools, were also greatly reworked and simplified for each Pokémon available in the game.
This design philosophy makes individual Pokémon behave entirely different from their counterparts in the main series games, and changes what makes specific Pokémon competitively viable. A Pokémon that exemplifies this is…
The pathetic pancake shown above is the Galarian form of Stunfisk, which was first released in Pokémon Sword and Shield. In the main series games, Galarian Stunfisk is a borderline gimmick Pokémon that is simply not viable in higher levels of competitive battling. It has a lackluster move pool, a terrible speed stat and an impractical ability that is challenging to take advantage of. In Pokémon Go, Galarian Stunfisk’s weaknesses are simply not a factor in PvP. All Pokémon have a limited move pool and no abilities, and the speed stat — which determines which Pokémon moves first in a turn — is not a factor in Pokémon Go’s battles where Pokémon attack each other simultaneously. Without these constraints setting it back, Galarian Stunfisk’s innate strengths — good defensive typing and bulk — are able fully shine in Pokémon Go and make it much more worthwhile to use in battle. Galarian Stunfisk also got incredibly lucky with one of the best movesets in the entire game, allowing it to become one of the most widely used and terrifyingly strong Pokémon in Go Battle League.
Galarian Stunfisk’s competitive relevance in Pokémon Go could not be further from where it lies in Sword and Shield, exemplifying the unique competitive metas that have emerged from Pokémon Go’s fundamentally different design and battle mechanics. Different factors influence what makes a specific Pokémon strong in Pokémon Go, elevating Pokémon that would have otherwise been left behind in traditional competitive Pokémon. This ultimately made PvP an incredibly fresh experience for me, as it provided me with opportunities to compete at a high level using Pokémon that simply would not have been sensible to use in the main series games.
Pokémon Movesets and Move Pools Make a Bigger Difference
The shift to Fast and Charged Moves in Pokémon Go have significant ramifications on how players approach battling and team building.
Fast and Charged Moves have natural synergies with each other that players must take into consideration when customizing the move set of a particular Pokémon. In addition to type coverage and covering the weaknesses of other Pokémon in the party, players also must consider energy generation speed and energy cost for the Fast and Charged Moves learned by a Pokémon. These characteristics of Fast and Charged Moves are also balanced with damage dealt, with fast-charging Fast Moves generally dealing less damage over time and the most damaging Charged Moves being the most expensive.
Without any non-damaging status and utility moves in Pokémon Go, I quite like how players in Pokémon Go are still encouraged critically think about the move sets of their Pokémon by evaluating different Fast-Charged Move combinations and their inherent trade-offs. For some Pokémon, players have the choice of using a high-damage, slow-charging Fast Move or low-damage, fast-charging one. There are different matchups, situations, and team comps where one Fast Move will be more advantageous than the other, and it is ultimately up to the player to decide which move fits better strategically with the team they are building. A similar thought process also occurs when selecting Charged Moves, with players having to weigh energy cost with damage and overall type coverage.
Fast-Charged Move combinations become more significant when you consider that Pokémon in Pokémon Go have more restricted move pools. Each move pool usually encompasses just 2–3 Fast Moves and 4–9 Charged Moves. With shallower move pools, Pokémon tend fall into specialized roles with strengths and weaknesses dictated significantly by the moves available to them. This gives each Pokémon its own distinct feel during the heat of battle, and no two species of Pokémon ever feel alike with how their individual Fast-Charged Move combinations work together. For example, Pokémon like Politoed and Galarian Stunfisk have a reputation for being “spammy” with rapid energy generation Fast Moves used alongside cheap Charged Moves. Other Pokémon like Clefable and Victreebel are famous enabling for Fast Move beatdown strategies, and rely solely on high-damaging, slow-charging Fast Moves to faint opposing Pokémon instead of spamming Charged Moves.
The importance of movesets in the game cannot be understated when it plays a central part in giving each Pokémon its own unique identity, much more so than the main series games in my opinion. This makes it fun and refreshing to experiment with different teams because each Pokémon and their different battle properties always gets the player to think in a different way. Team building is also an intellectually stimulating challenge in Pokémon Go with move pool constraints preventing Pokémon from easily pivoting to different roles. Adding and removing Pokémon from a team occurs more frequently than changing moves when it comes to minimizing and covering team weaknesses.
Adding Purpose to the Game
In many ways, Go Battle League added a meaningful goal for Pokémon Go players — to climb through the ranks and potentially have their name on the leaderboard.
Prior to the release of Go Battle League, I found that there was little purpose to the game with most in-game activity basically leading nowhere and not being rewarding enough for effort invested. For example, it can be argued that catching a rare Pokémon does not matter in the grand scheme of things if it ends up perpetually sitting in storage doing nothing.
Go Battle League changed all that, as the journey to hit the highest rank possible has its own share of exclusive rewards (to immortalize your achievement) and some insane bragging rights since it is only something that the most skilled few are capable of doing. Other milestones in Pokémon Go feel so much less satisfying in comparison because they are something that every player is able to accomplish eventually (e.g. Level 40), or are based heavily on factors like patience and luck. Hitting the highest rank in Go Battle League is the exact opposite, since not everyone is able to reach it during the season and intense commitment and hard work is required — and even that might not be enough to get there.
Once I really started to get into Go Battle League, my perception of the game began to shift entirely. All the decisions I now make in game have an underlying motive and work towards a tangible outcome — to ensure I can do the best I possibly can in PvP.
New Player Accessibility
I agree with the argument that it is difficult for new Pokémon Go players to adequately catch up to more seasoned players in Go Battle League. However, I believe that there are some misconceptions with how challenging and time consuming this is in practice.
In many ways, it has never been easier for new players to get started in Go Battle League and climb to a reasonably high level of competition. The biggest barrier to entry is acquiring enough leveled up, meta relevant Pokémon to make a solid team. Many developments in the game are allowing players to get to this point faster than ever before:
1. It is much more efficient to level up compared to the early days of Pokémon Go. There are many strategies that players can exploit to rapidly farm large amounts of XP. The maximum Combat Power (CP) a Pokémon can reach is tied to the player’s trainer level. Leveling up matters because some Pokémon cannot be fully powered up to maximize its CP for a specific league until the player reaches a high trainer level. Optimizing CP is critical as battling with under-leveled (and therefore underpowered) Pokémon puts the player at a considerable disadvantage.
2. As of November 2020, higher leveled Pokémon can be used at much lower levels. The number of Pokémon that new, lower level players can fully power up and build for battle is much broader than it was before.
3. Many meta-relevant Pokémon are accessible through normal gameplay, and can be found in the wild frequently enough to the point where grinding enough candy to power up and build these Pokémon for PvP can be done reasonably quickly. Weekly in-game events also generally feature 1–2 meta-relevant Pokémon, further expanding the number of Pokémon new PvP players have access to. Although some popular picks are unattainable for the time being, a new player can — with minimal time commitment and zero in-game purchases — construct a team of three that can stand toe to toe with more popular meta teams.
4. Trading enables new players to acquire Pokémon for PvP without having to grind at all, and enables access to Pokémon that are currently inaccessible in the game.
5. Niantic has recently started to emphasize leagues that accommodate lower-level Pokémon. For example, the Great League — the most accessible league — is available for two thirds of an entire season. These leagues are more friendly to new players as fewer resources are needed to build a competitive team for them.
Apart from these gameplay factors and changes, the growth of the Pokémon Go PvP community over the past year has had the greatest impact on making PvP much easier for new players to get into.
There is a diverse and growing spectrum of content and resources — YouTube videos, written guides, Twitch streams, battle simulators, Discord Servers — that players all of skill levels can tap into to learn the ins and outs of PvP and improve their gameplay. The Pokémon Go PvP community is one of the most open and supportive gaming communities I have had the chance to be a part of, and I wholeheartedly believe that members of the community possess a shared and genuine interest in helping others get better at the game. Instead of taking out our frustrations with the game on each other, the community also has an uncanny ability to direct its collective angst to Niantic to fix and improve the game. If anything, this exemplifies the community’s passion to make PvP a pleasant experience for all players and shows how much everyone cares about the long-term success and growth of PvP.
The warmth of the PvP community in many ways embodies how Pokémon Go is a game meant to played and enjoyed together — a key ingredient to Pokémon Go’s continued success and ability to resonate with so many people globally. I am proud to call myself a member of this community, and I am confident that the community’s fervent passion for PvP and Go Battle League will continue to attract new players and get them excited about battling.
Pokémon Go PvP and Go Battle League is not perfect. I could spend all day venting about the issues with the game. Whenever the game has me wanting to tear my hair out though, I remind myself that despite the shortcomings of the game, Pokémon Go players could have gotten a PvP mode that was MUCH worse. We should be thankful that the final product is a solid foundation for PvP that does so many things right and has the room to grow to be even better.
My greatest hope is that the Niantic team shares the same point of view that I have regarding the potential of PvP and Go Battle League. Niantic has truly delivered something special here, and I believe that the sky’s the limit with how much more phenomenal the game could become with greater dedicated support and investment from Niantic. Go Battle League has uplifted and provided so many players with an escape during a time where many people have faced adversity. Games like this do not come often, and when they do we should aspire to do whatever it takes to keep these games shining brilliantly.
