1. Double Battles
There’s a reason Double Battles have lasted long beyond their introduction in Ruby and Sapphire. It’s the standardized structure of competitive play, it’s the format so many attacks and abilities have been built on, and it opens up so many interesting plays that go beyond the main story’s usual “rock-paper-scissors” format of exploiting an opponent’s weaknesses for big damage. Double Battles made your team no longer feel like islands that operated primarily as different, rotating damage dealers, and now created new synergies that have become foundational to everything in Pokémon design.
Double Battles felt like a cool, iterative recontextualizing of an established formula back in 2002, but no one could have foreseen how it would completely reshape how we play Pokémon.
