Happiness

One of the less important game mechanics that is fully understandable without the use of complex equations and such is Happiness. It isn’t really the most helpful game mechanic in battle unless you’re speaking of the moves Return/Frustration, but it is a game mechanic anyhow. The other use for happiness would be for evolution purposes, which can obviously be an important factor for stats. Anyway, lets start off with some basics.

Logic would suggest that when you catch a pokemon, it’s not going to like you, but it’s not going to hate you either. There’s a way to increase the Happiness of a pokemon that you’ve caught immediately as well, and that’s by using a Luxury Ball instead of a regular Pokeball (or any other ball for that matter). Of course, you cant use Luxury Balls on hatched pokemon, so that shortcut is kinda useless if you are a breeder. There are lots of other ways to influence happiness however, so it’s not that important.

Happiness is actually as easy to influence as eating a piece of toast or turning a doorknob, or whatever other comparisons you can think of. The things that will raise happiness include:
-Having the pokemon in your party
-Giving it Vitamins

-Giving it a massage in Pallet Town, Veilstone City or Ribbon Syndacite
-Giving it Certain Berries -Gaining a Level

And of course, there are things that will frustrate a pokemon, causing it to dislike you. These actions include:
-Feeding it bitter food
-Letting it faint continuously in battle

If you capture your Pokémon in a Luxury Ball, the increase in happiness is much larger than if in a normal ball.

There’s also one item that influences happiness; the Soothe Bell. As for what it does, it increases the amount of happiness gained.

So you’re probably wondering (or already know) how to check on your pokemon’s happiness without a fancy equation or whatever. Well, you can easily check on it at one of the houses in Verdanturf Town (Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald), Daisy in Pallet Town (FireRed/LeafGreen). There’s a lady in one of the houses in that town that will enlighten you on how much your pokemon likes you. You know that your pokemon likes you as much as possible when she says, "It adores you, it cant possible love you anymore. I even feel happy seeing it."

In Diamond & Pearl, there is a Pokétch application that will show you the happiness of your Pokémon in your party simply by tapping them. It will be shown as hearts. There are various levels including one small heart, two small hearts, two big hearts and two large hearts. The two large hearts being the optimum happiness level. There is also a person, Dr. Footstep in Route 213, who'll give you the footstep ribbon if you show him a Pokémon with maximum happiness

So as for Return/Frustration, they work best when they’re happiest/unhappiest respectively. Now seeing as it’s so simple to gain happiness, I don’t see why you’d want to use Frustration at all. Anyway, they’re both Normal attacks and when the happiness is maxed out, the base attack is 104 (more powerful than Earthquake without stab but there’s no weaknesses to normal so yeah).

To evolve Pokémon via happiness, you must max out it by doing the above efforts, once that is done, you can evolve your Pokémon by making it raise a level either through battle or a Rare Candy. Below are all the Pokémon that evolve through Happiness and what they evolve into:

And thats all there is to this relatively simple game mechanic.

Thanks to Dragonair for writing this for us

 
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