if the devolution thing gets checked by the system to see if the evolved species really does evolve from that pokemon then that should go as well to allow weird evolution chains in custom pokemon. lunick and i were talking about how the pokemon can be just about anything and he asked me if it would support a JRPG and the answer is: probably. but here's a scenario i just thought of, say you're making a mod with a few classes as pokemon species, and your party members can be swapped between those species, with the game being about having the right balance of classes in your party. if evolutions only worked in chains it couldn't be implemented. its not something you'd have in the main game but if there's mod support systems should be kept as general as possible so people can just feed it different data to get very different results, so surprising things can be done we haven't thought of.