With both its thriving competitive community and ridiculous amount of pocket monsters, Pokemon X/Y may draw concerns of balance, especially considering the dominance of certain Pokemon in previous generations that were also ignored by Game Freak post-release.

In talking with DigitalSpy, director Junichi Masuda of Game Freak discusses the games\’ balance, claiming that the team’s extensive work on game balance has negated the necessity of future balance updates being introduced:

\”We don’t really plan to release any kind of updates to change the balance. Of course, we think we have it perfect this time, but thought that before and depending on certain move combinations. For example, at points a lot of people used the Metal Grass Pokemon because they were so strong – and everyone is using that Pokemon. Something like that could happen, and we think we have it perfect, and we don’t plan to release any kind of balance changes.” “We spent a lot of time working on getting this balance right, but of course we’re not going to be able to know everything’s perfect until the games are in players’ hands and they’re coming up with new strategics and combo. I’m really excited to see what strategies players come up with in the World Championships next year in Washington DC, to see if we’re done it right.” “We know people really like these Pokemon. If we released a patch to make them weaker, for example, it’s going to disappoint a lot of people.\”

Pokemon X/Y is in an interesting situation. Increasing the number of overall Pokemon once again, plus the changes being made to older Pokemon and new game mechanics, will certainly create a larger standard metagame, thus making it more likely that more Pokemon will rise to seemingly unrestrained dominance.

Unfortunately, as much as I\’d personally like to think Game Freak could attain perfect or even near-perfect game balance, it’s a lofty claim. Many competitive games have issues with game balance and they may only have a roster of thirty or forty characters, but there are over 600 Pokemon in the games already and X/Y aren\’t even out yet. Even removing the many Pokemon that are not used for competitive play or in many battling cases (such as unevolved, low-level Pokemon), there’s still a huge amount of Pokemon that need to be balanced. How close to perfect game balance can Game Freak really be?