I have played almost every main-series Pokemon game but I have never delved into the deeply confusing metagame. Breeding and training perfect pokemon has always seemed to be an incredibly daunting task. You have to somehow keep track of hidden numbers and variables and try not to completely **** up your ‘mon in the process. You see people throw around terms like EV and IV and it doesn’t take long before you just say “Screw it” before you go level up whatever Pokemon looks cool, regardless of how bad its base stat supposedly is.

Fortunately they seemed to make the system a whole lot less frustrating this time around, which is great for simple people like me. When I found that out I decided to give it a try and see if I could breed something halfway decent. It was a very interesting process and I can’t imagine having to do it in past generations. Anyway, here’s what I did…

Pokeugenics

So the first thing I had to do was pick something to breed. I ended up landing on a Heracross because he looks like a happy badass and has an interesting Mega Evolution and new ability. The first thing I did was to catch one in the wild and drop it off in the Pokemon daycare with a Ditto, your all-purpose breeding Pokemon. My goal was to breed a Pokemon that had a very specific nature. Natures give a bonus to one stat and a penalty to another. There are also neutral natures that don’t do anything. I was specifically looking for a Jolly nature (+Speed/-Sp.Attack) but with 25 or something different natures it would take quite a while. Especially since you have to run around until an egg shows up and then run around even longer until it hatches. There are ways to speed up the process but it can still take forever. Eventually I gave up on the RNG and just found a bug pokemon in my bank that already had a Jolly nature and belonged in the same egg group as my Heracross. In order to pass down a nature you can have the parent hold an everstone. Makes the process so much simpler. (more…)