Combat

Combat Introduction

Combat is handled in a turn-based structure on a square gridded battle map. Much like other party-based tactical combat games, Pokémon Odyssey makes the assumption that you will have the entire party face off against a threat at once, whether that be a group of wild Pokémon, a set of criminal Team grunts, or a Gym Leader fielding multiple Pokémon at once or battling alongside Gym Trainers. Despite being based on Pokémon, this game system is absolutely not designed for 1v1 battles.

At any given time, a player will have both their Trainer and one Pokémon on the battlefield, called a Battling Pair. Combat is separated into units of time called rounds, and each Battling Pair takes one turn during a round. Generally speaking, one battle is usually its own Scene, but sometimes back to back battles can constitute a Scene when grouped together.

The reason only one Pokémon per Trainer is active at a time is for game balance. You can come up with an in-world reason for this if you want, but it might be better just to not directly address it. NPCs will often command multiple Pokémon at once for encounter balance, and it’s fine to not directly address that either. Let’s be honest, this is one of the less weird things about Pokémon we have to gloss over or ignore to make the premise work.

Initiative and Turns

Once combat is declared to begin, any Trainers who do not have a Pokémon released immediately release one Pokémon. At this point, anyone who has a Pokémon out may also freely swap to a different Pokémon. Then, all Battling Pairs are put into a turn order by the Initiative value of their Pokémon. Enemies will not always be separated into Battling Pairs and may have their own Initiative value, even if they are humans, machines, or other non-Pokémon entities.

Then, the Battling Pair or enemy with the highest Initiative takes the first turn. After their turn is over, the next combatant takes their turn. And so on until all combatants have taken their turns. Then the round ends, any end of round effects occur, and a new round begins.

A Battling Pair may choose to hold their turn until a later Initiative value. If they do, that becomes their new Initiative value for the rest of the Scene (unless they Switch or their Initiative is changed in another way).