I agree that this would be an interesting featureset to bring into the games, though I think for variety they should also be balanced with the Pokémon Characteristics and other "currently flavour text only" features. This would also help balance the effect of physical attributes as well as special attributes, of which I can think for quite a few.
Originally Posted by MIAU
Also, players would have to memorize everything and the way it affects the damage dealt/received, which would probably make things overly complicated.
>Implying they don't already for competitive.
I really don't see this being an issue. Competitive people for example already memorize double sixtuples of stats to the digit, not to mention the power, PP and accuracy rate of every move, the type chart, and the effects of various abilities when combined. And non-competitive people just go with heuristics anyway.
Compared to
all that, species-wise attributes are far easier and more "automatic" to remember because they can be made to make sense with better sensory input, such as visual cues ("oooh! That Pokémon has big jaws! I bet a Bite from that thing would be nasty!") to begin with.
Originally Posted by -Yoshi-
Also, some of the Pokedex entries make things seem weird. For example, Blastoise's Hydro Pump can cut steel in half. So why wouldn't it OHKO steel types?
It's 2014 already, we all know that the Pokédex entries are crap on sale.
Originally Posted by Hoenn
But consider this: How would Pokémon like Alakazam and Reinculus benefit from this? How will the metagame be affected once the game tilts off back to Attack and having more advanced mechanics for the same?
Simple: ATT status is not the only thing affected. Just because something says "physical" attribute it doesn't mean it can only affect physical stats, which are a different thing; after all, a Quilava's ability to put up larger plumes of flame is a physical attribute as well. (or, to use a better term,
physiological attribute)
Ditto for attack / defense, and even for status things, such as making some Pokémon with access to mystical properties such as Ninetales inmune to Disable / Spite, just to put an example.
Coding-wise, I don't think it's too expensive to implement considering how expensive implementing a Pokémon engine already is. In the times of Generation 3, a Pokémon individual's stats were determined by a binary dump of about 60 bytes plus the information about the species in the ROM (which is a fixed cost). Adding for example two available tags out of a set of 63 (or 64) for each species only takes two bytes, which were back at the time already available as padding.
That only amounts to an increase of size in about one Pokémon of a box of 30.
The algorithmics behind the implementation of course are a different matter, but I still think it's basically fixed cost compared to what is already done (and what has been done with eg.: the PMD series).