Pokemon Sun/Moon Double Down On Competitive Battling, Introduce Rental Teams And New Rules

With Pokemon Sun/Moon, it looks like developers Game Freak are trying to double down on the competitive Pokemon scene more than ever before. We already know of features such as Hyper Training, introduced specifically to enable perfect build Pokemon more easily than they have been in the past.

But it looks like that won’t be all, and Game Freak will be adding even more features to make the traditionally obtuse competitive Pokemon battling scene more palatable to players. Today, for instance, they announced the addition of rental teams for online battling. Put simply, players who like their teams can upload them to the game’s servers, from where they are downloaded via shareable QR codes. This means that players who don’t want to invest the time into creating a team of viable battlers on their own now have one less thing to worry about when dipping their toes into online battling.

That aside, it also sounds like the rules for competitive battles will change for the Pokemon World Championship 2017 ruleset- only Pokemon from Sun/Moon can be entered into official battles, only Alola Pokedex Pokemon are eligible, and in perhaps the biggest shakeup, Mega Evolution are now banned.

All in all, it looks like Game Freak are trying to cultivate an even more vibrant competitive Pokemon battling scene than before- how these changes are received remains to be seen, but indications for now appear to be very positive.