Let's Do This Again Sometime

It was a great idea to introduce a method of 're-battling' trainers early on in the Pokemon series. Its more effective and more interesting method of training your Pokemon up than fighting wild Pokemon, especially once you have defeated the Elite Four.

However, Game Freak have never truly settled on method of battling old opponents. The methods that have been used are:

-The VS Seeker
-The Cell Phone
-That...thing that says when people want to battle again.

The worst is the Cell Phone, introduced in Pokemon Gold & Silver. It means you have to idiotically go through everyone on the off chance that they might want to battle again and often they will never want to battle, but will offer you an insight into their mediocre life..."Zubats are scary!"..."I hate when my Mum makes me come in from battling"...or of course, the favourite, "I LOVE SHORTS".
The Cell Phone might as well not exist, although once a guy called me up on it and explained that Stomp is doubly as effective if used against a Pokemon that has used Minimize, which I think if very interesting.

The third one (which I can't remember the name of) worked ok, but it was very limited to just a few trainers and was very random and odd. It was introduced in Pokemon Sapphire & Ruby and it was just a machine with a list of some trainers and a pokeball would appear next to their name if they wanted to battle again.

Now...the VS Seeker is excellent. You can run alongside any trainer in the game and try it out. So you are in control and choose who to battle again and most of the time, the other trainers do want a rematch. There are no random, time-wasting calls and no lack of certainty. Also, your opponenets Pokemon slowly improve. The one downside is that it needs charging by walking so many steps in the game, but thats really no trouble and encourages further exploration or battling of wild Pokemon.

This was a pointless article but I needed to express my love of the VS Seeker and my desire to see it in all future Pokemon games. Needless to say that Pokemon Black & White messed up the whole thing. If Apple made a VS Seeker, it's the one thing of theirs that I would happily buy.