What's new

As in the games, every move is physical or special, and every Pokémon has its own Attack, Special Attack, Defense and Special Defense. With the moves on its strong side, a Pokémon hits as hard as it did before.

Defenses count, but not by much. At 75 Defense you take normal damage; with a lot, up to 22% less; with little, up to 25% more. Each enemy hits with its strong side, and you block it with the defense on that side.

Level-up cards say whether a move is physical or special. Among new-move cards, moves on your strong side show up twice as often, and if a move does less than 95% with your Pokémon, the card says so.

Swords Dance and Dragon Dance now raise only physical attack. Nasty Plot, new, raises only special attack, and any Pokémon can learn it. All three are boosts: they deal no damage and last 7 s. The two dances share a counter, so they don't add up. With two boosts, new-move cards stop offering more. Details are in Passives.

• There are at most 3 healers, 3 shielders and 3 summoners alive at a time.
• Bosses heal and shield in proportion to the damage you deal them. What they heal or protect comes from what you took off them recently, and a new shield arrives at most every 6 seconds. They can no longer become unkillable.
• Poison still takes a percentage of HP, but against enemies with more than 60,000 HP that percentage is smaller: the damage grows with the square root of their HP.

The Judgment starts at minute 30. Running no longer gets you away from Arceus: these are the new rules.

• Controller: works with Xbox, PlayStation, Switch and most USB or Bluetooth pads. A confirms, B goes back, Start pauses, LB and RB switch attacks, Y rerolls the cards, and the pad vibrates when you take damage. Turn it on in Settings > Controls.
• Manual aim (Settings > Accessibility, off by default): your melee, beam, projectile, boomerang, dash and cone attacks go where you point, with the mouse or the right stick, instead of at the nearest enemy.
• Cards you cannot pick by accident: level-up, bond and item cards look dimmed for 0.6 seconds when they appear. Pressing 1-4 or tapping to switch attacks mid-fight no longer picks a card by mistake.
• Big Pokémon are playable: Onix, Gyarados, Wailord, Eternatus and the legendaries are drawn a bit smaller and collide like a normal one, so they fit through the corridors.
• Pause: the run summary lists each move with its category, its damage and its damage per second, plus your stats with everything you have raised.
• Collection: search by name or number, a tab with every generation, filters that combine, and sorting by number, name, rarity, latest catch or most used. Favorites are set on each Pokémon's card and follow your account.
• Saving: your game uploads to the cloud every 10 minutes, and there is a Save button at the top right.

• Every leaderboard starts from zero: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and all-time. Records from running away from Arceus could no longer be reached, which is why they start from zero too.
• Security: a hole let someone put code in their leaderboard row and run it in the browser of whoever opened it. Everything that comes from other players is now cleaned when it is read.