When did I say it was the first?
To be useful as a point of comparison things tend to have to be notably better/different than what came before or the first. There is some leeway for the ultra popular examples and that we do not typically call things doom clones any more says the rest of that line of logic.
This is risking becoming a circular line of not all that much reasoning though so I reckon a summary as I see it.
The OP questioned whether it was a competitive title. Competition as a term has roots several areas of maths like game theory, mechanism design, competition theory and such like right through to the AI that governs NPC battles.
The short version/result of all that is if the concepts are not in the rules then they do not count. This is not a bad thing and in the more general fields of game design such things arguably fall into the ideas of meta gameplay, something which by virtue of the cartoons, the cards, the comics and the like the people behind pokemon excelled at to an almost unparalleled degree (some of Valve's stuff, world of warcraft and maybe a handful of other "MMO" type games being the only things to even come distantly close). Similarly game theory is a limited discipline by virtue of it starting from the assumption that all actors are rational, though much as game design is more than numbers for the rules game theory recognises this and adapts to it.
My analysis of the maths of the game -- several hundred possible pokemon, several hundred moves a piece (limited no less), moves that are not preset, pp, hp, stats, battle alterable stats, incomplete information (I possibly do not know the pokemon you have, their PP at a given instance, their moves, their obedience...), items, items that can not be used in certain types of match (if my memory of red and blue holds you can not use a pokeflute in link battle, though I do have to also add that the pokeflute awakens both participants unlike the consumable item to do the same), random elements, arguably not a "take it in turns" battle and on and on leads to options at any one time, and AI to match, being basically impossible to consider from a supercomputer and certainly the human brain, this places it far above any noted board game too. However when narrowed down by catching and training the perfect pokemon with full ev/iv guides (something which is basically grinding), and also by virtue of the mechanics dismissing decent percentages of strategies, it reduces the complexity right back down to where a barely skilled human can manage the permutations once more. By virtue of this I struggle to call pokemon a competitive game when playing by the initial rules; given a reasonable grounding in the rules and a well picked set of ev/iv trained stuff* and the outcome is probably random, go to chess which is a far simpler game taken in light of the previous and I doubt anybody could beat a grandmaster but more to the point I do not see (and the maths would likely back me) the potential for chess grandmaster level play** within pokemon. It occurs to me that people have previously dubbed pokemon an entry to this style of game (more pejoratively "my first ..."). This is not quite the same as my issues with the likes of many "competitive" fighting games and tournaments using the game but such things share many of the same elements.
*for the record ev/iv is a fairly basic compound interest type of affair, nothing especially interesting as far as maths goes.
**after you know the pieces and their moves your next steps are to learn openings, mid games and end games, something that can not really happen in pokemon by virtue of the points (game theory definition of points) needed to win a match reducing play time to very few moves ("It's super effective").
If you like role playing in it, like runs/challenges like nuslocke or whatever, like the ev/iv scene then fantastic, and I commend the game's designers for pulling it off even if it is not an uncommon trait, and taken in light of some of the above it may even render it competitive, however that is all you and yours and not the game itself. In essence it is somewhat like playing a hacked game which is a different game from the perspective of the maths.
