Generation I/Comparison/Balancing Issues

The original first-generation games had some game balance issues, mainly due to the limited variety of Pokémon type combinations and movesets. Those that were eventually fixed in Generation II (and are thus exclusive to Generation I) were:


 * Pokémon had virtually no match because their moves were resisted only by other Psychic types and their only weakness was to the Bug type, of which there were only three damaging moves:, , and . Additionally, most of the Pokémon that learned these moves were part Poison and therefore weak to Psychic moves. moves while officially meant to be super-effective, were completely ineffective against Psychic types due to what may be a programming bug. Additionally, the only Ghost type move  was very weak while the only Ghost type Pokémon that existed at the time was also part Poison type.
 * The only damaging move was the set-damage . On one hand, this meant that Dragon-type Pokémon could never take advantage of STAB, but also that the only moves that could hit them with super-effective damage were  moves.
 * The stat represented both Special Attack and Special Defense, meaning that a Pokémon with a high Special stat had an edge in battle. For example,  had a base Special stat of 100, used  (considered "Special") moves, and was weak to mostly Special types.
 * Critical hit ratios were based on a Pokémon's base speed, allowing faster Pokémon to deal more critical hits.
 * One-hit knockout moves were also based on speed, making them useless if the user was slower than the target and overpowered if the user was very fast.