Hey there. I'm working on a little project and as part of that I got to thinking about how intelligent Pokemon really are, and I'm curious to see what other people think on the topic. In the anime, Pokemon are almost invariably portrayed as having near-human intellect; not only pronounced personalities but capable of various degrees of abstracted thoughts and, in some cases, speaking verbally or telepathically. The Mystery Dungeon games takes this even further. On the other hand, the main series games (particularly the older generations) tend to portray Pokemon as somewhat more animal-like (barring a few specific Pokedex entries). Personally I dislike the anime variant and tend to look at Pokemon like they are reasonably smart animals; dogs, chimpanzees, crows and dolphins, put on a sliding scale; weedles in the lower end as rather simple-minded bugs; alakazam and latias in the upper end as fairly smart. But they're all without the capacity for abstracted thought - you can order it to use moves, and a gardevoir can read emotions, but you can't discuss philosophy with it. In the wild, most Pokemon act entirely on instinct.