Are you one of those kids who grew up watching episodes to the first season of pokemon every morning watching as Ash, Misty, Brock, and Pikachu went about through Kanto ever-waiting for them to make it to the pokemon league, and became extremely excited over the prospect of fighting other high-level trainers tournament style all the way to the top? It sounded like a lot of fun.
But then you got Red, Blue, or Yellow Version, fought your way through the region to find out that the league consisted of fighting four shut-ins back to back until facing off against your rival. For me, this was rather crushing at the time, and although watching my brother fight his way up the chain of challenging elite was an awesome (my folks didn't get me my own pokemon game for some reason, but that's a story for another time) I felt it was detracting compared to what it could've been had it been living breathing tournament involving a whole slew of high-level trainers.
13 years have passed since I watched my oldest brother defeat Blue in Pokemon Red Version, and the thoughts stayed with me. Years passed, and my first actual experience playing pokemon came in the form of Sapphire Version, and then later Emerald. Emerald was clearly Gamefreak's first valiant effort at creating challenging tournament style arenas and they did it with some success, but still had work to do.
After all when you stand in a room waiting for someone else to come with with fighting words like "I WANT TO GO AROUND" (true happening) you feel rather detached from the experience that the person actually has an interest in fighting you.
Now Gamefreak is entering the next age of handheld console gaming, and it's pretty impressive hardware. The safe bet is that they're sticking to their tried and true formula of an Elite 4 with a Champion at the top that's probably someone you met on multiple occasions during your time playing the game.
But just imagine with me what would happen if they went about this new gen with a plan to bring the tournaments from the anime to life in the game. What would that look like? What could that look like?
What'll be required
First and foremost is getting a sense that these trainers your facing are more than just proccdurally selected characters with randomly generated messages to them. That's just damaging in immersion.
Establishing a roster of characters with some sense of personality (if not complete) could be a good place to start. Each one would have to have some semblance of uniqueness, but doesn't have to be entirely original in pose and assets, heck, here's something I did ages ago using assets from the D/P sprite set:
I'm aware the series is making a big overhaul to 3D, so I understand this complicates things
This can also make good use for cameo appearances of all the trainers from previous versions. After all, they're quite a crew.
Each character should have something meaningful to say both in and out of the match. And here's what I mean by that.
More than just battles
Depending on the desired scope of the concept, one could infer that simply being allowed to talk to other trainers, to trading with them, or casually battling them outside of the times it matters could be an option. For those who just want to fight, they are given the option to skip to the next match.
But even better, can be an interwoven story arc involving the region mafia organization or some other undesirables. What if you find out that one of the competitors is actually there to ploy a coup while Team _____ uses the power of magnets to snatch everyone's pokeballs? Okay, it's a pretty lame story, I know, I've been out of the Pokemon loop since D/P and was turned off by how crappy Movie 11 was (even though Movie 10 was sooo goood - in Japanese).
What if some of these other trainers and you band together to make a coordinated strike on Team _____ headquarters where you could switch off with other trainers to tag-team in battles, or even need them to solve large environmental puzzles from multiple locations unreachable by all one person? The scope could be quite enormous depending on what elements of the deeper lore could be tapped into involving the Legendaries, and what not.
Movie 10 was one of the best movies of the entire series for purposes of lore and what not, and it took place right before Dawn was going to participate in one of the biggest Coordinator contests in the region. What's to say the torunament would not be located in a city with a past involving legendaries getting into some trouble?
Some Benefits and other ideas (because I can't really sort)
Such an event in game could be well managed to provide fans a fresh helping of post game content as well as new competition with well balanced and strategic teams similar to those seen from the members of the Battle Frontier (my gosh was Lucy friggin hard to beat). Gamefreak could manage to integrate perhaps a few different storyarcs that tie into the events at the tournament that can all happen in intervals a month (of real calendar time) or more after the last tournament was held.
Other ideas like allowing the player to inset themselves into the shoes of NPC trainers during the tournament, and use that trainers team against the other to get a feel of what other high-level pokemon they may not have might be like should they get some theirself could do well to get people interested in training other pokemon for online battles, rather than just sticking to their well-planned team they've had forever.
And that's all I can think of at the moment, feel free to share your ideas.