How Will Fairy Type Change Your Team Up For Competitive Matches

How is balance maintained in a game like Pokémon, with different types having advantages over others?

In Pokemon? The short answer is they do some amount of making sure each type has some strengths and some weaknesses - for instance they (relatively) recently introduced the Fairy type into the game, which counters the previously very powerful Dragon and Dark types.The long answer is - they probably don’t care all that much about ‘balance’ in terms of how we often think about it in video games. When people say balance they often mean the multiplayer balance that no few strategies or options are just flat-out better than others. And in terms of Pokemon, that’s not important. Pokemon is not a multiplayer game. There are ways to battle in multiplayer, and there is even a whole competitive scene, but the amount of people involved in that seriously is barely relevant. Those scenes usually set their own tier lists, basically weight classes for what people are allowed to bring into them (so you can’t bring whatever overpowered legendary into this match up of worse Pokemon).But in terms of the single player, the balance is basically irrelevant because it can be easily designed around. “Dragonite is super powerful? Okay put it at the end of the game starting at a low level so you have to grind with that Dratini for a while.” or “We want this early trainer to be hard, what are some types that the player wouldn’t have encountered yet.”I would even say that further down is the fact that Pokemon is an RPG, and RPGs are often about grinding up your power levels. This also makes balance really difficult since the player is inherently the most imbalanced thing in the game, since at any point they can be facing level 50 Pokemon in trainers and go “Boy I wish I were more powerful,” and then they go grind all of their Pokemon up to level 60.Basically don’t think about Pokemon in terms of Balance. Don’t think of single player games in terms of balance. Think of them in terms of design and player challenge.