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Pokemon X and Y director discusses the games' strategic depth and Mega Evolutions

By Patricia Hernandez on Sep 19, 2013
Originally Posted at: http://kotaku.com/naw-digimon-had-nothing-to-do-with-pokemons-mega-evol-1347292978

Portions of the original article were removed. Only the interview parts are included below.

So did Game Freak, the developers behind Pokemon, ape the concept of having a Mega level of evolution? This Monday I sat down via video conference with Game Freak's Junichi Masuda, a founding member of Game Freak who is Pokemon X & Y's director, and I asked him if there was any Digimon influence on the Pokemon franchise—and if not, where did the idea of Mega Evolution come from?

It's just a coincidence. Here's Masuda:

Game Freak really believed that the evolution, the concept of evolution, is one of the defining characteristics of the Pokemon games—it always has been, since the beginning. With Pokemon X & Y we had three main themes, one was beauty, one was bonds, like the bonds between people and Pokemon, and the third was evolution.

And so on the concept of evolution, we really wanted to take that defining characteristic with the series, and see if we could do something new with it, take it to the next level. But we knew that we had to keep the balance of the battles…after discussing with the team how we could do this, keep the battle balanced and introduce a new stage of evolution, we came up with the idea to require a held item—a mega stone—be held by the Pokemon, and also have mega evolutions be something that only happens during battles.

So what this does, it adds a bit more depth to the battles, because you have to hold this Mega stone in order to Mega evolve…that means you can't hold another item that may be quite useful…so this kind of creates battles with even more depth.

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Last updated 19 Sep 2013 15:52 by Sunain.
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