We want to maintain the original ideas behind characters as much as possible. While we want to remove things like King Dedede's nature of "chaingrabs a lot breaking a lot of situations" or Ice Climbers "we do infinites" that are just blatantly bad for the game, we do want to preserve things that aren't so bad. Honestly, PT stamina is like that. Basically, the PT has an inherent and huge advantage. He's three characters. People don't tend to think of this, but having in-built switching mechanics is a really big advantage.
No, it's not a big advantage. I'd go as far as to say it's hardly an advantage at all.
Think about this for a second. Zelda has been able to switch from one character to the other since Melee. Now how many Zelda mains off the top of your head that play seriously in tournaments use her ability to switch regularly?
Even MORE so in Melee! Melee had 6,000,000 tournament Sheik players. Unless they quick changed for recovery purposes, though, you NEVER saw Zelda anywhere in a Sheik fight.
If one character is inherently better for a match-up than another, why would I want to use the other? Because the option is available? Just because the option is available, does that suddenly mean it should be FORCED on me?
And getting back to Melee, Zelda could realistically switch to Sheik without being punished and vice versa. In Brawl, Pokemon Trainer can't optimize a bad match-up without leaving himself open. You can knock them away and switch, but God help you if you're in a low-damage part of the game. You're S.O.L.
IN THEORY, Pokemon Trainer's switching makes sense. But since when does ANYTHING Nintendo likes
in theory make sense in application?
The bottom line is: there was never a good reason to force you to use one character when you want to use another. No other character is forced to do that, and Trainer shouldn't be, either.
With three of them who are all individually quality? PT would just be broken, almost unavoidably.
Please tell me you're kidding. Look at Brawl+ and tell me just how "broken" the individual PT Pokemon are, being able to function by themselves. With respect, this is really an absurd argument.
Even if all three of them were theoretically top tier, they'd all have relatively bad match-ups at times, and therefore reasons not to use them. If I want to play Charizard in a match-up, there's no reason that I should have to play Squirtle afterwards. That'd be like someone that wants to use DeDeDe in a match-up being suddenly forced to Wolf mid-match. Sure, Wolf is a fine character by himself, but they want to use DeDeDe!
You learn to play all three and just use whichever one is best in any given matchup.
In theory, you learn every character in the game so you're always prepared for a match-up. But that doesn't resolve the crux of the argument: if I want to use one character, I shouldn't be forced to use another.
leaving in an artificially restricting system to force you to use all three in every battle seems like a far better choice, and it is the original design concept at work here.
Again with this original concept design! Throw that argument out the window. NINTENDO'S ORIGINAL CONCEPT IS
STUPID! IT WAS
NEVER A GOOD IDEA! STICKING WITH A STUPID IDEA BECAUSE IT'S THE WAY IT'S INTENDED MAKES NO SENSE.
PT is about teamwork, and I don't see that we should defy his team concept when it was never his problem. His problem was that his team was really inconsistent in quality, and we have addressed that (Ivysaur is awesome now, and Charizard saw buffs too).
Many PT players would argue that Charizard was the best of the three in the first place (it's a toss-up between him and Squirtle), but that's as may be.
The point is that if I want to use a specific Pokemon for a specific character on a specific stage, I'll pick that Pokemon before the match begins. About the only real use PT users get out of switching is stock tanking with a heavy character, and even that tends to be a last-ditch effort rather than a grand strategy.
Stamina and auto-switch should be done away with.
