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A former Pokemon world champion has said one of Sword and Shield's legendries "completely breaks" the competitive scene with a single ability.
Pokémon VGC World Championships 2016 winner and YouTuber, Wolfe Glick aka WolfeyVGC, has made a video taking aim at one specific Pokemon and what one of its abilities means for competitive play. In the video, titled 'Is this Pokemon Ruining the Game?', WolfeyVGC explains how Pokemon Sword and Shield legendary Urshifu changed the competitive Pokemon scene in "a way we literally could not see coming" back in 2019.
As explained in the video, WolfeyVGC believes that Pokemon "should not work" as a competitive game due to there being over a thousand different characters, an "incredibly complex" type chart, and new centralizing mechanics being added all the time. The Pokemon champion says that despite all of this, there's one simple move that allows the creature-collecting game to work as a competitive game.
The ability in question is Protect, which according to the YouTuber is "nearly worthless during a traditional playthrough" of a Pokemon game. The move allows players to not take any damage during their turn, protecting the Pokemon in your team so long as they don't overuse the ability. Almost every single Pokemon in the series can learn it and WolfeyVGC calls it "the bedrock of competitive Pokemon."
This is due to the ability allowing Pokemon games to center around "positioning and preservation" meaning (when playing in double battles - as most competitive games are) it's easier to keep one Pokemon alive while the other in your team deals damage: "It's the only reason this game works at all," the YouTuber claims. There are alternatives to Protect, like Faint and Imprison but none of these work as well as the aforementioned ability.
As other competitive players will already know, it's the release of Pokemon Sword and Shield's expansion pass that threw a spanner in the works for Protect in competitive Pokemon. This is when Urshifu was added to the long-running series, along with its ability Unseen Fist - which allows the user to ignore all protection moves when using a contact move.
Urshifu is even problematic for competitive players outside of the Protect ability. As WolfeyVGC explains, the Fighting/Dark or Fighting/Water type Pokemon is "one of the single strongest Pokemon introduced in all of Sword and Shield" with two forms and "extremely powerful" signature moves that always result in a critical hit. Things get worse once Pokemon Scarlet and Violet roll around in 2022 and add the new mechanic Terastallization which allows Pokemon to change their type once a battle, granting Urshifu a further boost via Rain Dance.
Players are basically having to deal with a Pokemon that ignores Protect, has no drawbacks, and is super strong - which WolfeyVGC says "completely breaks" competitive Pokemon. As pointed out in the video, out of the six major competitive events that have happened since Urshifu's introduction, it's won five of them and the one it didn't win, it came second which should tell you how powerful this Pokemon is.
Towards the end of the video, WolfeyVGC attempts to answer the question 'Is Urshifu ruining competitive Pokemon?' to which the former world champion reveals - although "It's complicated" for several reasons - they do believe that the game would be "much better" without the legendary as having a Pokemon that breaks the rules of the game and also be so powerful, "just isn't fun."
Find out where Sword and Shield places on our best Pokemon games list.
