i'm gonna be entirely honest and say that some of this super interests me (panfandom pokemon yay!) while lots of other parts of it are just... not really up my alley at all. like i can say right now off the bat that i know i would be out if the site is proboards.

as far as some advice goes in terms of the years of experience i've had in this heckhole that is pokemon rp (and my limited panfandom experience) -

1) i'd actually say for you to let people keep at least some semblance of their core powers, skills, wealth/status, etc since tbeh a lot of characters lose a lot of their core identity by losing that stuff, to the point that you're basically more making "pokemon oc inspired by xyz character" than "actually playing xyz character". (like i mean, try to picture deadpool without his regeneration or figure out how to do groot or alphonse elric as concepts - it's messy) and i mean. in my experience, a lot of people actually have basic pokemon rosters for their characters, so just. let them do that.

1a) actually you could probably go all in whole hog and make it so the canons are pokemon shifters because that sounds super cool but i am also dumb and should probably be ignored.

2) i'm personally not a fan of going into the games universe but that's because i just personally am not a fan of rehashing the games. and i think that the regions tend to be too large to really encourage a lot of interaction between characters who live in different areas, which can fragment the site unnecessarily. but ultimately, that's your call since it's more of a preference thing than a legitimate critique.

3) if there's one thing i've learned with pokemon, it's to put in a battle system. you will regret your life not doing it. because otherwise you're going to have to deal with anime protagonist over here with "hahahahaha my pikachu won't faint to your ONIX" and then you have exasperated mod over here screaming about how they have no idea when to make the pokemon faint reasonably. do yourself a favor - basic system. take 2 actions per turn (dodge, attack, heal), limit dodges/counters (like you can only use 1 dodge per post and can only use a damage-reducer thing twice before you have to take a full hit). all pokemon have 10 hp, attacks do 2 damage, +1 for super effective, -1 for not very effective, +1 for mega. done. i throw out levels because i hate dealing with them but i'm just old and tired of grinding forever for levels and of the pain of trying to join a site at level 5 when half of it is at level 50 so. yeah.

4) you will need a money system. no doubt. pokeballs at bare minimum. tms / hms + more pokemon (randomize out of a type or a set list or for a specific one) if you wanna add more.

5) honestly? i'd throw out regions entirely since like i said, it's gonna be really fragmented to do for anything but a very small handful (ie, alola, orre, almia, ransei). i'd recommend going with, idk, a small area with maybe three or four different "towns" with distinct feels (maybe corresponding to general settings for people to match their characters to for member groups like futuristic, medieval/fantasy, steampunk-esque, realistic modern?) and then building out some wild areas around them to flavor it and give you modding areas for wild pokemon. it'd be a lot more compact and give you some flavor without spreading out too thin and making it hard to come up with reasons for characters from different areas to interact.

6) legendaries aren't actually that bad if they're actually catchable by everyone (meaning y'know you can have 5 enteis running around). just make sure there's not mew or arceus since yikes fam let's not have actual god and jesus. but again it's your call, i just wanted to "hey this actually isn't the worst idea ever if it's actually handled well".

7) whatever you do, do not stagger pokemon in releases. people will get so salty if they have no way of getting their charmander or their rowlet or what have you. which actually honestly, that's kind of why i have very little faith in rare lists anyway since i mean, you can say eevees are rare until you're blue in the face, you'll still end up with about 20 of them if you give people half the chance. far easier for everyone to just cut your losses, accept that people are gonna try to get their teams regardless of you, and let them do their thing.

8) jcink isn't actually half as painful as some people like to make out. the acp can be a little overwhelming at first, but it's super easy to distill down (especially if you make the root admin a dummy account and then trim down the available areas in the staff accounts). skins are downloaded via an xml file and then you just upload them back up and make sure that the skin set is all coordinated with the right wrapper + html templates + macros + style sheet. (jcink doesn't have plugins, it has "mods" but tbeh that's only used for rep and money, and while it does have other optional features like user-created groups or awards, they're acp-enabled so you can largely ignore them if you don't want to use them.) i keep meaning to actually make a tutorial for the jcink acp i just. keep not working on it.

............ i just realized i basically swept in here and just more or less "okay but listen, let's do things not-like-that" on a lot of this which i. didn't entirely intend. just. oops i did this now because i've run too many pokemon sites and get too picky on the systems and i low-key stare wistfully at my shelved pokemon project, just let me crawl back into the abyss, i'm sorry.

also even if i do end up out on the site, i'm still up for bouncing systems off of and giving opinions/advice since i would be excited just to see this succeed as a concept even if i'm not part of it oops