Pokemon Winds and Waves could ditch traditional turn-based battles after 30 years

Pokemon’s traditional turn-based battle system could undergo major changes in future games, with Game Freak revealing that spin-off battle sim, Pokemon Champions, was partly created to preserve that format, regardless of where the mainline games go. Turn-based battles have been at the core of the series since Pokemon Red and Green launched in Japan in 1996, but Game Freak has increasingly experimented with how its games handle combat. Pokemon Legends: Z-A has already experimented with exactly that outside of the core RPGs by replacing traditional turn-based combat with real-time battles. Now, Pokemon Champions director Kazumasa Iwao has suggested the wider series could also continue moving away from its established rules.