Over the last few years it’s slightly disappointed me how little goes into raising and caring for a pokemon. Its never really been super rewarding. It’s mostly just been raise their level and that’s it. This is what I would do to increase that experience while also maintaining the traditional play style.
Increase trainer difficulty while having less route battles. Spamming your strongest move and finishing a trainer battle in less than a minute has never been rewarding. I think every battle should at the very least similar difficulty to a gym battle. While giving all gym leaders a full team with also increased difficulty.
HP regen. To account for the increase trainer difficulty, I think pokemon should have a slow regen. Most people carry around items anyway.
Ailments. Pokemon having regen would make Pokemon centers a little less useful. I’ve always thought having ailments would add to the caring factor. Sick if the pokemon has been in a weather condition that goes against its typing. Exhaustion if your battling with it to much or using overworld abilities. Injured maybe can happen randomly if you use an attack. To keep the traditional playstyle, I would say ailments have very slight effects like slower regen or reduced stats. And can only he remedied by either being taken to a Pokemon Center or in short using Pokemon Amie features over an extended period of time.
Overworld ability skill level. I think they have the beginning s of something with the type specific obstacles in Legends ZA. They could put similar obstacles on routes and have a skill level that lets your pokemon break bigger objects or whatever the skill is over time.
Recently caught don’t obey. Basically when you first catch a pokemon, for a while until you get their friendship up slightly, it’ll do the trade pokemon not obeying thing.
Move learning skill level. I always thought it would be cooler if when you first learn a new move, you have to use it a little to make it stronger.
Hunger bar. Just let us feed our pokemon. That one is pretty basic.
Can you think of anything else that would make raising a Pokemon more rewarding?
by Odd-Guard-2533