10 Reasons Pokemon Is The Greatest Franchise In Video Game History

8. The Depth Of Micro-Management Is Huge (But Totally Optional)

Games are, on the whole, merely what you make of them. Do you grind though a load of side quests and get all the cool items, or do you power through the main missions to see the story? Do you have all your friends round for your favourite sports title, or do you go alone online and cast aspersions about the mothers of total strangers?

Pokemon's a fantastical adventure, but at its core it's a micromanagement game. You assemble a team of monsters, each with unique sets of skills and abilities, and work them as a well rounded unit. On the surface it's pretty basic, and you need put no more thought into the game than "that looks cool, I'll catch it" it to be completely playable.

But you could buy the same game, go to the same place, catch the same type of Pokemon at the same level and with the same moves, and they'd still be different in a number of subtle and important ways. Each breed of monster has strengths and weaknesses in its stats, as well as a nature that influences that further. Then there's also a myriad of visible and invisible values that determines exactly what a Pokemon stats can be. All of which are influenceable during both breeding and development.

Here's what the actual maths looks like for calculating a Pokemon's Attack, Defence or Speed: CP ≈ [√STA x ATK x √DEF] 10. People out there genuinely understand what that means as well, and will dedicate literally hours of their life to improving an attribute by a few points. Why? Because there's other people out there doing it, and as with anything in life there's satisfaction to be gained by doing it better.

Your eight year-old cousin can catch a Lapras that grows to have 252 Special Attack and a 29 year-old WhatCulture writer *cough* can breed and raise one to have 280. The beauty of it, is both will still have just as much fun finishing the story and playing online.