Evolving your Pokémon feels really good. The simple act of training up a Pokémon and seeing it metamorphose into something else--a creature more powerful and often more badass--is one of the central reasons why Pokémon is such a powerful franchise. You, the player, can see the fruits of your labour by not only experiencing your Pokémon getting stronger, learning more moves, but seeing them change physically as a result of your combined efforts. The normal method of evolving Pokémon is simple: once a Pokémon reaches a certain level a screen pops up telling you that the Pokémon is evolving (sometimes into different things depending on a Pokémon's sex) and you can let it happen or intervene and stop the evolution. From the very first Pokémon games there have been other ways of evolving Pokémon, the traditional way being bringing a Pokémon into contact with an evolutionary stone, the other being trading Pokémon between games. Game designers wanted players to find other people who also played Pokémon: this helped turn Pokémon into a social activity and incentivized more people to buy the games. Players could fight each other's Pokémon, and trade them as well. This choice was and remains absolute genius because it gives a single-player game an optional multi-player component to enjoy. Well, mostly optional because after a visit from the Dark Lord a designer apparently suggested that players shouldn't interact out of mutual enjoyment and benefit, but they should be cajoled into trading Pokémon because not áll Pokémon were included in the different versions of the game, ánd certain Pokémon would nót be able to evolve unléss you traded them. I'll probably talk about the Pokémon trope of having two versions of the sáme game, and then a third later on at some point, but today I want to focus on evolution gimmicks, so let's move on.
Trade evolution brought players some of the most iconic and powerful of the existing Pokémon: Gengar, Machamp and of course the all-mighty Alakazam. Over the years the roster of trade-evolution Pokémon has continued to grow, some even requiring certain items to be held in order for the trade evolution to work. Not only has trade evolution persisted, all manner of néw types of evolution have sprung up, each more convoluted than the next: evolutions based on the time of day, evolutions based on the moves a Pokémon has, proximity to certain landmarks, certain stat distributions, how happy the Pokémon is, having other Pokémon in your team, leaving a slot in your team empty, even holding your game console a certain way! It's come to a point where game designers are just scrambling for new gimmicky ways of evolving Pokémon so they can point at some new 'innovation' or showcase some new feature in the game. I don't necessarily háte different evolution methods, my main gripe lies with how badly the Pokémon games convey information about hów different Pokémon evolve. Usually you're forced to go to Gamefaqs or Serebii to figure out how to get certain Pokémon because the games don't often tell you. Evolving Piloswine into Mamoswine requires it to have the move Ancientpower. Getting Shedinja requires you to leave a team slot empty. Electabuzz needs to hold an Electrizer to trade-evolve into Electivire etc. I'm actually surprised we haven't seen a Dream World evolution yet. This wouldn't be so bad if the game told you how to evolve these Pokémon; the easiest way would be to simply have enemy trainers use those Pokémon and then talk about how they got them after the battle!
But this is Pokémon Revisioned, so I'm going to go beyond a simple tweak into why I think these kinds of evolutions need to be cut back. In short, they're a hassle and only require a bit more effort; there's no skill involved and the excitement wears thin immediately after getting these Pokémon the first time. Evolving a Pokémon like Tyrogue into Hitmontop is a horrendously arduous process (it requires a very specific stat distribution to work), and collecting the items you need to trade evolve certain Pokémon calls for nothing but a bit of searching online and planning for it. Trade evolution even has an additional risk involved where the other player might decide to screw you over by keeping the Pokémon you just traded away if you don't have any friends locally to trade with. I'm still in favor of some alternative evolution methods, but they shouldn't be overtly difficult to pull off in terms of doing more stuff to make it happen, and there shouldn't be too many in a game.
I advocate cutting out trade evolution entirely; we don't need multiple versions of the same games, and forcing players to go through additional hassle to gain certain Pokémon is not fun--not to mention immersion-breaking--so it's time to let it go. Pokémon should either through simple level up, through the use of evolutionary items (and I think this should only be possible at certain levels), by Happiness (it's thematic and usually obvious) and sometimes through the use of dawn, day and night. Having Pokémon be affected by their surroundings is an established theme of the Pokémon games: you have Fossils, Gems, Rocks and Evolutionary stones already; it makes sense to have Pokémon evolution be triggered by certain objects. Pokémon happiness is important to the theme of Pokémon, and encouraging players to keep an eye on how they treat their Pokémon enforces the explicit message of the games (although I think the happiness system needs changes as well, frustration isn't a good counterbalance) and the day and night cycles are so clearly visible--reinforced by noticing that different Pokémon appear at different times of a day--that it's not a stretch to have some Pokémon evolve based on that condition. If the games want to make use of some one-off evolution methods I can live with that; I'm personally partial to the Shedinja method of evolution (two Pokémon for the price of one!), but the games should start being very conservative when it comes to dreaming up evolution methods, and if they want to get creative they need to make sure they're telling the player about it so you're not pressured into looking for a walkthrough to finally figure out how to get that damn Escavalier. Sure, holding your 3DS upside down is an evolution method we haven't seen before but it makes absolutely no sense from an immersion perspective. Are you a Pokémon trainer or just a kid pressing buttons on a device? Gimmicks like these detract from the gaming experience rather than deepen it with the wonder of how all these different creatures change their form.
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