Game Freak on balancing Pokemon strength
The Pokemon series has continued to grow, including the amount of creatures. There have been over 700 Pokemon created thus far.
Game Freak naturally has a daunting task in keeping all of the Pokemon’s strength balanced in each one of their games. How do they go about that?
Battle director Shigeki Morimoto explained:
We start off with an idea in mind, like “How would this little fellow have to be used to be able to beat that guy when it’s about this strong?” Keeping that in mind, we assign stats to each Pokémon. After that, we do all kinds of playtesting among ourselves and adjust areas where the balance seems off as we go along. Even so, after the games are released, we find that they are still sometimes used in ways that we never imagined. There is still room for customization by deciding moves and Abilities, and so it’s really interesting to see what trends develop on the battle scene after the games’ release.
