Pokemon's BIG Problem With Power Creep 

Download Opera GX today! operagx.gg/JPRPokeTrainer98 Also go check out Moxie Boosted's channel, without his help this video wouldn't have been possible!!

My first Sword playthrough basically turned into _"How many times can I spam Pyro Ball in one battle?"_ 😭

Zacian has 170 attack and 148 speed with 115 defenses and gets +1 attack on switch in, Calyrex has two abilities despite its 165 SpA and 150 speed. Meanwhile, Regigigas is still stuck with slow start for some reason even though it has 160 attack and 100 speed :/

JPR: "Archeops needs no introduction" Defeatist: "Well, you're half-right"

The problem with power creep in competeitive perspective is that they do not rebalance super broken pokémon like other online competitive games tends to do. In fact, every "update" comes in the form of a 60 dollars game.

Can't wait for Koraidon and Miraidon to have abilities that basically just function as dragon dance so long as they do one thing that... nah they'll probably just get it for existing, Zacian is basically that

#1 Dynamax Hater right here!!

Making new things stronger than old ones is fine in the short term, but you need to keep the old things viable. Gen VIII did not keep the old things viable; it actually made some of the old things _less_ viable by taking away the boosts earlier generations gave them!

The trading card game is also heavily impacted by power creeping, at first there was like charizard and mewtwo with over 100 hp and attacks that did huge damage had drawbacks. And now, a lot of the cards have over 300 hp that you can get easily and do more than 200 with minimal drawbacks.

Another thing to note with Regieleki is that its speed is broken in a very literal manner. Due to the programming in how Trick Room works, Regieleki's speed stat is at such a high level that it's immune to Trick Room if getting 2 or 3 Agilities up first.

I think the video would gotten the point across better if you explained how previous meta threats dropped in usage by a huge amount and how many actually held on as the generations went on.

It's interesting to see BW are somewhat not too easy despite a regional Pokédex loaded with good options, while XY has really good Pokémon but is piss easy, even if one believes they forgot to give stronger teams to NPCs to compensate in-game.

It genuinely feels that Gen 8 is the Elephant of the room when it comes to power creep. It's bad enough that Dynamax and the 20 minute timer killed single battles in game, but the new Pokemon were only kept in check by Dynamax. If they don't get any nerfs coming in Gen 9 the meta will be an unhealthy all out offense no defense mess. And it could get worse from here.

I would note that with Articuno specifically(since it's in the thumbnail) it's actually gotten significantly weaker since its very first implementation in japanese gen 1. For one its special attack used to be as high as its special defence owing to the gen 1 special stat. Freeze also used to be absolutely busted in gen 1. And in the original japanese gen 1 games blizzard had a 30% chance to freeze. And of course there were no stealth rocks back then.

I think the best evidence for power creep is in the starters. The first starters were all these kind of all-rounders. Not spectacular in any stat, but not terrible either. They had their roles (like Blastoise being physically more tanky) but they didn‘t excel to an extreme. Then, I‘d argue with the introduction of Blazakin, this changed. Gamefreak not only realized that with Fire/Fighting, they had a great type-combo (which made them spam it to death eventually…), it also was a lot more specialized in its role. Which they then out-did one gen later with Infernape. Suddenly starters weren‘t all-rounders anymore (which to me always made sense for a starter) but became a lot more powerful due to their specialization. Which eventually ended up at the point where we are now… With Incineroar being so damn OP at this point that it‘s barely optional in WGC anymore. You really shouldn‘t get one of the best pkm as a starter… that seems poorly thought out.

Surprised there was no mention of Incineroar when it got intimidate and then parting shot in Gen 8

yeah I thought this was just me, glad to see others agree. seems like they're "1-upping" themselves for the hell of it at this point. we do NOT need a pokemon with 200 base speed 😭😭

8:57 Metagross was neutral to Dark and Ghost, not resistant.

Special Thanks to Marcos for contributing to the VGC portion of this video!

If they can nerf Gengar by changing his ability, they can change Delibird's Hidden Ability to something GOOD.

I'm replaying Ruby so I can use my favorite Pokémon, Zangoose. I never realized how busted it can get. When you catch one, it has swords dance already and then learns slash at level 19. You get a silk scarf in Dewford Town, so you can have a 70 base power attack with boosted crit chance, a STAB bonus, a silk scarf, and swords dance before the 4th gym.

I dunno why Wolfie defends Dynamax so much. He is probably the only VGC player I see that defends Dynamax because all the others say it's a really bad mechanic.

here's the really fun part about mega kanga: if you use seismic toss on it, it hits twice and the second hit doesn't have reduced damage

I do like some of the gimmicks like Mega Evolution and Dynamax, but yeah, they were nuts trying to fight it with yours down.

I was running lightning rod Raichu exclusively to counter Regieleki. God, I hated that Pokémon, but it gave me a lot of free special attack boosts.

Videos like this make me both excited and scared for what Terastallization will bring to the table. Will it be more or less broken than Dynamax? Well, guess will find out next month...

If you want to know how broken sword and shield really are. If you have the dlc you can go to crown tundra before having a single gym battle and do max lair's. You can have team full lvl 70 legendaries and 65 pokemon other pokemon before first gym and for some reason max lair pokemons will listen to your orders.

I just wish Mega Evolution was not given to Pokemon that were already top tier. It could have been a great tool to push overlooked Pokemon.

gen 5 is always the sweet spot for everything

Are we gonna skip the fact that fairy was put into the game in order to stop both Dragon and Dark types from becoming too op like they were in gen 4-gen5

I remember when the Dexit happened and the pro was: Oh, hm, it balanced the meta. No. No it didnt

4:07 _"Example 3 would just be ease of access to really powerful TMs [in Gen 3]."_ Meanwhile Gen 2 with its Elemental Punches, right around the 3rd Gym: 🙄

Powercreep always felt like an inevitable but slow occurrence in Pokemon, but in the Switch generation it just got absurd

Despite all the QoL changes Gen 8 brought, it’s the gen that made me quit competitive. While past generations definitely had tangible power creep, it felt like iterations on the same game. Gen 8 felt like a total reinterpretation of the Pokémon battle system. VGC was EXTREMELY fast paced, strategies that were viable before didn’t even make sense anymore, and you can’t even play singles at all. I hope Gen 9 offers some more variety and brings back the chess match feeling of Gen 4-7.

i fully agree with power creep situation pokemon like dragapult having 142 speed 100 special attack 120 attack and still have decent average bulk is some thing else it alone completely invalidated gengar which is mon that is banned in bdsp there are other examples like tapu lele which invalidated latios which again was once banned and theres even power creep with defensive mons like toxapex who is the sole reason why 50 percent of mons run earthquake and corvinight who fully invalidated skarmory

Totally random but I smiled when I realized you use Chain Attack from Xenoblade Chronicles 3 as background music!

The Xenoblade ost in the background is just *chefs kiss*

I'm barely familiar with competitive or anything remotely close but I have a question. If Mega's were brought back, would it make sense for them to be limited to be sort of a more balanced mix of the recent/different gimmicks (Mega, Shadow, Dynamax, Alpha, Terastalize)? The thought I have is that it gives a blanket overall stat boost for a limited number of turns and gives/changes a Pokemon's typing. Shadow/Alpha/Titan forms being like an alternate perma-blanket boost but somewhat acting like a "glass cannon" effect depending on their "Shadow level". The glass cannon effect having a bigger range at high levels but a more ideal "even" spread at lower levels, but have it be that if they ignore using Shadow moves at the lower levels before being purified, they're more likely to go into a frenzy state (Hyper Mode) where they don't listen and automatically use different moves, Reverse Mode being sort of the same where it might take effect if you decide to use the Shadow move to avoid Hyper Mode.

Just start slapping slow start on any new pokemon. Easy.

I'm just happy that my boy feraligatr has managed to mostly stick to uu despite said powercreep

I bet if they had just kept megas without any of these other crazy gimmicks, they could have kept things balanced.

I stopped playing competitive at the end of black and white and looking at this video all I gotta say if wtf that power creep is insane

I feel like this is part of the reason why mainline Pokemon games feel almost a little TOO easy these days. They need to make sure new Pokemon will have stats that make people want to try them out instead of falling back onto their favorites from prior generations, but in doing so, it only adds to the issue of making Pokemon from generations past more and more obsolete outside of the ones commonly seen in the VGCs. I think the perfect example of how bad power creep has gotten in Pokemon is if you were to fight in the Battle Tree back in Sun/Moon prior to Gen 7 gaining PokeBank compatibility. You were using a party of only Pokemon native to the game's region, but you were going against Pokemon from everywhere else, and aside from a precious handful of Alola Region Pokemon, damn near everything native to the region would get bodied by Pokemon from regions prior. Now, I get it, if you're going to go to the effort of making anywhere from 70 to 150 (ish) new Pokemon for a new region, you're going to want people to pay attention to them instead of ignoring them in favor of older Pokemon. And you can't just not include any of the older Pokemon in the game, because that's only going to enrage the fans, so what else is there TO do but make as many of the new Pokemon as you can have stats that rival if not surpass those of popular Pokemon from past generations? Personally, I feel a lot of this has to do with the fact that with the emergence and rise of the official VGC tournaments, as well as unofficial competitive scenes like Smogon, a lot more people nowadays only seem to look at new Pokemon from a competitive standpoint. If it's not able to rival or replace an already existing competitively run Pokemon, whether it be in the VGCs, or in OU tiers, then a lot of people will simply either ignore it entirely or trash it as being useless or a "bad" Pokemon, dooming it to living in the shadows of past generations unless either someone manages to discover some clever strategy involving it or they use it for lower tiers like UU or NU. So in order to make these people actually be interested in newer Pokemon, the devs kind of HAVE to make at least a good amount of a new region's Pokemon be either just as good or better than what's already popular in the competitive scenes, otherwise it's all going to be mostly wasted effort.

i was just thinking about power creep yesterday, that Drought and Drizzle used to be exclusive to Groudon and Kyogre, and as of Gen 6 so many common Pokémon had those Abilities that they basically had to Mega Evolve and attain extreme versions of them to be Legendary again 😅

From gens 1-5 I think the power creep wasn’t too bad. But Gen 6 is when mons started getting really broken with Megas. I like megas but that’s where it started

I know Aegislash was a menace but god was he fun to use

Great video! I really have been noticing a lot of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 music in the background of your videos lately. You have great taste in XB3 songs! Sometimes, me jamming to them distracted me from the video haha.

Would Legendary Pokemon be considered unbalanced since they tend to have a huge Power Creep.

Power creep will never be enough to get Landorus off of every f--ing team.

It’s power creeps we’ve been getting since Gen 6 that makes me wonder why they even bother in nerfing anything anymore. Cresselia, Aegislash and the Galar Duo getting their stats nerfed in SV was unnecessary. Yes during the Dynamax meta the doggos were op, but with that gone in SV, there was no need to nerf them, also Aegislash getting nerf was uncalled for in SWSH, it’s gimmick wasn’t reliable with Dmax either, and things creep up with every new generation anyway.

12:48 "Don't have time to cover" Dude you're not close to hitting the YT video length cap, yes you do.

I miss mega evolutions they're too cool looking

The gen 8 section felt incredibly biased ngl

"Salamence is probably the hardest Pokemon to raise and evolve in this generation." Milotic fans: 👁👄👁

Power creep is why I hated on Mega Evolution. Yet so many people love it. Sure megas buffed some otherwise useless mons, but also many solid and meta mons got even better.

Meowscarada has a move that always lands a crit and never misses and meowscarada has high speed

I wouldn't mind if for one generation they didn't add any new pokemon and just re-balanced every fully evolved pokemon. A lot of old pokemon are casualties of mechanic changes such as the special stat split, introduction of abilities, and the physical special split. A lot of modern pokemon also seem to benefit from gamefreak's own better understanding of competitive pokemon having more optimized stat distributions with the same bst.

Yea I liked Mega’s because they gave us new forms, and even some of the G-Max mons look cool……but I’m not a gimmick guy. I won’t use them in a play through. But for raids and things after the main story, sure. I also understand their struggle to try and keep the games “fresh” so I’m not hating on them. Just don’t use them in runs anymore

so many pokemon creators are doing collabs these last few weeks. I love it!

What is the name of the ost played at the introduction to vgc 5:00 beyond?

Yo, what up Moxie? Love collabs between youtubers I'm already subbed to. Keep up the great content you two!

Moxie Boosted is literally why I got into competitive play! So coooool 😁

Music's a little loud compared to Moxie's voice, especially in the gen 5 section where the Xenoblade 3 chain attack music is playing.

How’d he not talk about phy special split in gen 4

Man going through a lot of these takes me back to when i was learning to understand competetive play a bit. Unexpectedly nostalgic video lol

Tyranatar has always been amazing since it debut.

16:19 That Drifloon did nothing wrong.

I saw a theory on reddit that in gen 1 normal type's specialty was supposed to be high powered moves like explosion and hyperbeam, where as other types were supposed to apply status conditions. That would have been able to create some balance between typings but..

I disagree with your stance on Gen 8 singles. If you look at the Gen 8 OU tier, it’s actually mostly comprised of previous-Gen Pokemon, with only a few exceptions like Dragapult or Rillaboom. Something like half of all Galar Pokemon ended up in Untiered, while a majority of those that remained ended up in a lower tier. Sure, there were some obviously strong ones like most legendaries, the starters sans Inteleon, G-Darm, and the fossils, but all gens have a few extremely strong mons. Even Gen 2 had Scizor, Tyranitar, and Blissey (though they obviously weren’t as strong as the strong of Gen 8, being post-Gen 5 in terms of general power). I would say Gen 8 had much less power creep than Gen 7, 6, and 5

16:19 me, 4 years old, when i go to my parent's room to tell them i barfed on the floor

Yeah funny how Cyclizar got banned to ubers

So beyond games & anime, what are some examples of power creep or its opposite (power spiral) you've seen in other media such as in superhero movies & related works like such comics that you've found?

Urshifu's Unseen Fist should make itself not able to use Protect

Then we have Ultra Beasts which got a +1 stat boost to their highest stat upon knocking out a Pokemon who often had crazy high stats

One of the reasons why I quit the games after gen 5. Not the only one, though. Even when I was specialized in countering that boring tryhard stuff, at some point I just got tired to see the same things all over again.

Name of OST that starts playing at 21:30?

Wolfey's camera glare is legendary

HOLLY FLOOF never thought to open your video within seconds after being posted XD

Gen 2 had power creep, but the PvE power creep was far outclassed by the increase in opponent competency. Gen 1 AI could not be trusted to not hurt itself with elemental stat-changing moves and often had attacks like fury attack in the Elite Four and Champion battles.

Really interesting video! Love the pokemon BR OSTs in the background

The way I see it, power creep only really started being worthy of talking about in gen 6. Before that it was mainly just balancing, with just a few notable mons breaking the boundaries in how powerful a pokemon could be, and most of those were legendaries, pseudos and certain niches; a manageable amount. Unlike in something like anime, it's not an issue if power creep is distributed such that everybody gets a lot better in ways that weren't expected if it's for balance. I'm not going to complain about the believability of a gen 1 pokemon suddenly becoming gods in gen 5 if it's for equalized viability. It's when power creep starts to create a large margin between levels of viability across the board, that's when it becomes a problem. Honestly, even in anime, while silly at times, I still find it more tolerable if all the characters level up to absurd heights, rather than a few becoming gods while other previously competent character no longer have any business being on screen.

Yeah, in sword and shield, I managed to walk into Milo’s gym with a level forty cinderace and a level 25 centischor

I spamed Dracovish's funny move once I got one in the main story of Shield.

It's even worse now in Scarvi, the number of just insane moves and Pokemon is higher than ever. And they still refuse to give Gengar its levitate back because that's too broken...

When I saw gen4 sprites I shed a tear not gonna lie TwT

it’s interesting because the powercreep is the only thing keeping cutscene creep from completely ruining the glitchless speedruns of pokemon. the fact that pre huge power nidoking can beat red in less than half the time that primarina and lunala can beat moon is crazy

It hilarious how despite how op Zacian sounds it still doesn't dominate Gen8 as hard as how Mewtwo dominated Gen1. No other pokemon will ever dominate as hard as Mewtwo did in gen1, there was no pokemon that could ever hope to match to mewtwo aside from another mewtwo and after that your entire team and every single pokemon ever loses hard to Mewtwo, you simply didn't handle Mewtwo

It's funny, I loved mega evolutions. All they needed to really do was tweak their stats a bit. But instead of that, we got Pokémon but BIG.

What music was used at 19:14?

I think a lot of pokemon are due for a few massive buffs. As well as the gym leaders, christ they suck

What I loved about the original release of mega kangaroo was it could be one shot by an Umbreon of all things, but only in the generation the mega kangaroo released in as after the nerf it couldn't produce the bulk needed to get one shot. Mega Kangaroo players almost always opened the same way, mega and powerup punch which gives a +2. They almost always opened with the mega too so it was an easy predict. Even if they open with Fakeout they will still play powerup punch the following turn. Umbreon has enough bulk to survive the double powerup punch. With 0 IV and EV in attack and a nature with a negative in attack, just opening with Foul Play was enough to win. The disparity between the neutered attack of Umbreon and the +2 attack of the mega kangaroo was just enough to one shot the mega.

I wonder if Terrastalyze will be more broken than D max

I never understood why people called X/Y power creeping and too easy, but now I realise that's because I don't use starters, I never accepted the Lucario (don't need no handouts, yo), and the pokémon I like are generally weaker. Oh, and I switch off the exp share, which also helps make it a bit more of a challenge.

The fact that Ash and Pikachu are so overpowered in Pokemon Masters EX..... I don't know... trust me this sync pair is way too powerful compared to the majority of sync pairs.... even Giovanni and any of his Pokemon. But can we talk about B2W2 when we could actually battle VGC teams!? How are those trainers so good?!

Love to see the monster hunter clips in the intro!❤️

I'm surprised you didn't talk about incineroar for gen 7

"gEn 2 dIdNt hAvE pOwEr cReEp". Me, glancing at umbreon, rest strats, spikes... Riiiiiiiiight...

I’m surprised there was no mention of Incineroar.

One of the main reasons why the power creep and imbalance is so bad is due to Gamefreak only ONCE ever doing stat buffs for older powercrept things (Gen 7), which then they immediately stopped doing despite that having very positive reception and a positive effect on the game. There's also the stupidly hypocritical design philosophy where several pokemon are not allowed to have certain moves that synergize with their typing and ability for "balancing purposes" yet other pokemon get ludicrously strong movepool + typing + ability synergies so absurdly strong that the previous group even with synergizing movepools would still likely be bad in comparison. Would a Rock type Fang move really make Tyrantrum, Dreadnaw, and Hisuan Avalugg broken or even good for that matter? No, of course not. Yet things like Technician Scizor are a thing, following the same move-boosting ability design principle but with a perfect movepool to abuse STAB + Ability synergy that Gamefreak refuses to provide to some, yet frivolously allow with no drawbacks to others.

And which game is the theme from?