My Wish For Pokemon's 30th Anniversary: Good Raids

On February 27th, Pokemon fans got great news: A new mainline game is coming out, and even better it won’t be out until next year! 

Now this excitement isn’t because Pokemon fans are uniquely patient so much as they’ve been burned by previous generations, especially Scarlet & Violet, the most recent games, coming out undercooked.

Unfortunately given 2026 is the 30th anniversary of Pokemon, I would not be surprised if this new game only got a year to breathe before the next one was announced, because I’d try to release the tenth generation of Pokemon games on the 30th anniversary, so depending on what the actual development cycle has been, that might end up rushed.

So I’m putting out my bare minimum hopes for the tenth generation games: Please for the love of all that is good and holy can raids be good?

Raids are one of the few reasons I use Nintendo Online, and when they work, they’re great! They give players a chance to get version-exclusive Pokemon or trade evolutions if they don’t have someone they can trade with.

Key phrase being when they work. The method for choosing which raid you want to join is slow and the connection is poor. Often when you look at the available raids and click one, it’ll be too late to join someone, and you still have to wait to be able to refresh the page.

You also can’t search for a specific Pokemon, so you can be there for a while.

And then after all that, the game can actively fight against you, causing you to lose the raid. 

For one thing: the game doesn’t give you information in real time. 

The opposing Pokemon essentially gets four turns for every turn you get, but you can only see one of its moves. This means a Pokemon can quickly max out a stat without you noticing, leaving you confused about why you’re suddenly dying.

On the player’s side, different steps of the status screen will show you different information about where the opponent’s health is at, or which of your allies are down.

Sometimes your Pokemon will get attacked and then the game won’t show you your own health bar. This makes coordinating online really, REALLY hard, especially if you want to bring a support build.

Even if you don’t want a support build but would like to heal, the in-built healing function will randomly only heal 20-100% of your HP, which means if the roll is low enough you just wasted your turn.

There are times in an online raid where it can be better to just sit there and not do anything if the opposing Pokemon is about to knock you out

Theoretically, if you were coordinating with friends in person or over Discord it could be better, but a lot of the issues with timing exist there too.

So here’s how I’d fix online raids for Gen 10:

• Get the infrastructure sorted out. The search and raid function is very annoying.

• Let version exclusives be available in the opposite game as rare raids. This will help with Dex completion without requiring an online component.

• Go back to making them turn-based. Raids were like this in Sword and Shield and it worked much better. For one it didn’t feel like the game was essentially punishing you twice for fainting by taking a chunk out of your timer AND THEN forcing you to wait until your Pokemon can be sent out again. It also means that moves with long information or extra dialogue boxes don’t become annoying. Most importantly you have accurate information if you want to play support.

• Make cheers more consistent. It’s nice that people who ultimately don’t have the means to deal damage can do something to help the team but it would be great if that something was consistently helpful so it could rely on strategy.

• Standardize HP amounts. This is just for my sanity frankly but boss HP is calculated by multiplying their base HP times 40 and it can mean even if you’re hitting for super effective damage, high HP Pokemon can stall you out for ten minutes

• Be less restrictive on builds you can use. There are over 1000 Pokemon now, it is wild to me that some of the harder raids can only be beaten solo by a small handful of them. You shouldn’t be able to bring a Pokemon that’s under-leveled and weak to your opponent and be fine, but considering how much raids prune your options by giving your opponent extra moves and making certain status moves unusable while being able to turn off your ability, I don’t think it would break the game that much to say, allow for players to have two held items in raids and increase the number of viable Pokemon in high-level ones.

What I’ve been playing: Fittingly enough I’ve been playing a lot of Pokemon recently, in particular Legends Arceus. It’s gotten me very excited for the next one.

What I’ve been reading: The next book on my list is House of Glass by Sarah Pekkanen. I picked it up because I love thrillers and messy families, so I’ll see where it goes.

What I’ve been watching: The TNG watch-through continues! Damn season 5 was good. A lot of banger episodes and great guest stars. I also desperately need to know if any modern Star Trek comics have given Riker a one-off boyfriend since Jonathan Frakes thinks his love interest in “The Outcast” should have been played by a man.