Trading has been a staple of the Pokémon franchise since its inception. After improvements with each generation of games, the UX of trading took a nose dive with the latest installments.
Introduction
Pokémon, the popular video game series that spawned the largest media franchise, began with the release of the first game(s) in 1996. Having a number of spin-off and side games, and other media, each new era of Pokémon is tied to the release of a new main series game. The main series Pokémon games have always been released in pairs, and the key difference between the versions is what Pokémon are available to the player.
With not all Pokémon catchable in any one game, players have to trade Pokémon with each other to be able to complete the Pokédex, an encyclopedia cataloguing every species of Pokémon. The trading process has improved quite a bit in subsequent games since the original release, but the developers dropped the ball on this mechanic in the latest releases. In this post, I’ll cover the history and current implementation of trading in the Pokémon main series games.
Trading as a game mechanic
Trading has several purposes in the games. The most notable being the ability to acquire Pokémon species not native to one’s copy of the game. Trading also permanently increases the Pokémon’s experience gain from battles to 1.5x the original rate. Most importantly, trading certain Pokémon causes them to evolve into new species, which are not attainable otherwise.
Trading in the early days of Pokémon required people to physically connect their systems, creating a shared experience between players. Depending on one’s access to other players, a player might have two completely different experiences with this mechanic. One might have fond memories of playing together with a friend, working together to complete the Pokédexes in both games. On the other hand, if you knew nobody else with a Game Boy and a copy of the other version, you were shit out of luck, never able to obtain the “trade evolutions” of certain Pokémon. Unfortunately I’m part of the latter group, and to this day, I have never been able to form a bond with Machamp, Gengar and other similar Pokémon because how hard it was to obtain them.
However, as technology advanced, so did trading: online trading became a reality in the fourth generation games on the Nintendo DS. This is where completing the Pokédex got achievable for those, whose friends were not into the franchise. Online trading was here to stay from then on, but not without a rather significant step backwards, which I’ll discuss later in the post.
Progression of trading
Here I’ll briefly cover the trading process from the first generation of games until the latest. For extended information about trading, I recommend reading the wiki page for trading on Bulbapedia.
Generation 1-3
In the first three generations, players had to connect their consoles via a Game Link Cable, and proceed to a Pokémon Center in game, where the players would offer one Pokémon from their party and if both trade partners accept, the Pokémon will be transferred between the two different games.
Generation 3 began with the release of Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire on for the Game Boy Advance systems. Trading worked largely the same until the release of the Game Boy Wireless Adapter that was packaged with most copies of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, remakes of the first generation games. The Wireless Adapter was an alternative to the Game Link Cable, but due to the limited amount of supported games, did not gain traction.
The most notable use for the Wireless Adapter was with the aforementioned remakes – it allowed up to 39 people to join in so-called “Union Rooms”, where trading and battles could take place.
Generation 4-5
Generation 4 is when things started getting interesting: the Nintendo DS was capable of connecting to Wi-Fi networks, as well as wireless communication between the devices. What this meant for Pokémon Trading was huge. The GTS, or the Global Trading Station, was introduced in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, and it was a game changer.
The GTS allowed trading Pokémon from across the globe, making it more convenient than ever before. Players could offer one of their Pokémon at a time, requesting another in return, this being limited to Pokémon the player has already seen before. Other players could then see the offer via the GTS, and complete the trade if they wished so. This was a huge step from the cumbersome cables and limitations of the previous generations. This was what allowed me to finally complete the Pokédex for the first time in the 10 years I’ve played with the franchise.
The GTS stopped functioning on May 20, 2014 when the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service was discontinued. However, the feature was so popular, that custom servers were established to allow further use of this feature. As of time of writing, some servers are still functional. Aside from the GTS, the wireless connectivity of the Nintendo DS systems allowed people to mingle in the wireless Union rooms.
Generation 6-7
Generation 6 is when Pokémon trading reached its absolute peak with the addition of the PSS. This generation started with the release of versions X and Y (I swear these are the actual names) on the Nintendo 3DS. Games of this generation were the final ones released on handheld systems.
In these games, you could access the GTS through the Player Search System, or in later games, the Festival Plaza, right from the bottom screen of the device. What made this convenient is that you could trade, battle and chat from pretty much any point of the game. Additionally, players could request and Pokémon on the GTS, even ones they have not yet seen before.
Wonder Trade was introduced, where players could offer a Pokémon for trade, and would get another random one in return that was offered by another player on Wonder Trade.
These games were followed by the Generation 8 games, released for the Nintendo Switch. These games mark a significant change in how Pokémon trading works, but before I talk about it, I have to mention another feature: the Pokémon Bank.
The Pokémon Bank
The Pokémon Bank is a paid downloadable app for the Nintendo 3DS family, compatible with the Generation 6 and 7 games. It allowed players to transfer Pokémon between compatible titles and most importantly, store their collection online.
Through a companion app, the Poké Transporter, players could transfer Pokémon from the Generation 5 games to the Pokémon Bank. This meant that Pokémon captured in the Generation 3 games could be transferred all the way up to Generation 7 and beyond.
This is a great feature, allowing the completion of the Pokédex in subsequent games easier. Pokémon bred for competitive play could be carried on into the latest releases, saving player a lot of time and energy.
In order to manage the Pokémon collection, players simply had to start up the app on the handheld device and carry out the desired actions. Of course this meant that the game had to be closed in order to access Pokémon Bank, but since this was more of a deep storage system, use of this was not disruptive to gameplay.
Generation 8 and the cumbersome trading
The Nintendo Switch, the latest generation Nintendo console, saw the release of the Generation 8 games: Sword and Shield. While these games had some great online multiplayer elements, and despite the Switch being a more capable system than its predecessors, trading has been made into an absolute nightmare of a system.
The GTS has been removed from the games entirely, and is now a part of a mobile application, coupled with Pokémon HOME, the latest iteration on Pokémon Bank. The Bank, free to use after February 16. 2022 due to the upcoming discontinuation of the 3DS eShop, is not compatible with these and any upcoming games. This means that players’ collections will eventually need to be migrated over to Pokémon HOME, the new storage and trading system, which offers a paid and free plan. However, Nintendo Online Subscription is needed if players want to battle and trade online.
Pokémon HOME offers some extended features over Pokémon Bank, such as connectivity with Pokémon games outside of the core series, and it currently houses the GTS. On paper this sounds good but when it comes down to practice, it offers poorer UX than trading in previous generations did.
HOME is split into two separate applications: one for the Switch and one for smart devices. The Switch version is basically used to transfer Pokémon to and from games and the cloud-based storage space. The smart device application is used for trading, and the trading process works just like in previous games: the player can seek a specific Pokémon and complete the trade if able to, or offer a Pokémon of their own on the GTS for a specific one they wish to attain. Wonder trading is possible through the Wonder box, where up to 3 Pokémon can be deposited to be traded for a random one.
These changes and additional software mean that the trading process has devolved into a mess that requires 3 separate pieces of software (including the game) and 2 different devices. What was achievable without having the exit the game involves several steps more on the latest-generation console.
In order to trade a Pokémon, the player must go through the following process: First, to move a Pokémon to the online storage, the player has to exit and close the game they’re playing and boot up the Pokémon HOME app on the Switch. Here the player will move the Pokémon they wish to trade from the game to the cloud storage system, and once changes are saved, they have to exit and close the HOME app on the switch. Following this, they need to open the HOME app on their smart device, and complete or initiate the trade. Once the trade is complete, this process has to be done again, moving Pokémon from the HOME app into the game before having access to the traded Pokémon.
A colossal step backwards
Trading, once seamless and easy, now requires software and hardware separate from the console in order to carry out one of the core features of the franchise. Outside of needlessly complicating the process, the worst offense is that as of now, trade evolutions do not trigger when trading through Pokémon HOME. Granted, these Pokémon now have a chance to spawn once a day under certain conditions in Pokémon Sword and Shield, but no news on what will be the case regarding these in future titles.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around some of the changes to the trading system. Removing it from the games and putting them in a smartphone app just means that trading itself becomes disruptive to one’s gameplay session, as the game has to be exited in order to carry out something that was doable since the series’ inception.
Local wireless trading is still accessible in the game, so why not global trades? This problem persists in the recently released Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl (BDSP), remakes of the first Generation 4 games.
Here, players can connect to a Global Union Room, where they can battle and trade, but I’ve had rather poor experience with this. Quite a few times I connected to a room with only 1 other player in it. Trading works by showing what you’re offering, and based on that, the other player can choose to decline or proceed with the trade. So in a sense, global trading is in the game, but you are unable to look for specific species of Pokémon.
Pokémon HOME connectivity is still not implemented with BDSP four months after their initial release, which means that you do not have access to your collection. In order to complete your Pokédex you can either wait for the connectivity to be implemented, or once again attempt to catch every Pokémon in game. If you’ve been playing with the franchise for some years, the latter has already lost all magic and wonder and feels more tedious than rewarding.
Trading’s not the same anymore
I personally feel that this feature lost some of its magic once online global trades were introduced. One didn’t have to physically meet up with someone in real life to trade anymore, making the process lose its personal touch. And more than ever before, the trade evolutions and version exclusive Pokémon began to feel like they exist only to prop up the two-version system of the franchise.
Past this point I feel that selling two separate versions of the game with very minor alterations became less justified from a game design standpoint – at least with its current design. There wouldn’t necessarily be a problem with this, if the feature accounted for these changes in technology and started to offer added benefits to keep it fresh and worthwhile, but nothing significant has been done with trading for years.
I always felt that trading had some untapped potential, but with the latest changes I lost all inkling to do online trades simply due to how inconvenient the process has become.
Create a problem, sell a solution – my closing thoughts
The move to separate global trading from the game itself and put it in a smartphone app seems a bit senseless to me. The smart device component of this process could be easily done away with if its features were integrated with the Switch version of the app. It would streamline trading (compared to its current implementation), and potentially save energy and cost on development as well.
My main issue with this is that they took something that was part of the games for 13 years and made it worse than it was. The way it works now does not add any benefits compared to how it used to be, and on top of it, acquiring trade evolutions reverted back to how things were almost 3 decades ago. Either the player has to meet up with someone in real life, or find a willing partner on various online forums with whom they need to discuss schedule and trade details. This eliminates the convenience that the leaps and bounds in technology should offer by default.
In closing, they should have improved on the system instead of breaking something that didn’t need fixing in the fist place. It was on a steady rise with each new release, until it hit a brick wall with the latest product design.