Unpopular opinions

Yung Dramps

awesome gaming
Playing Pokemon Platinum almost immediately after finishing Shield has been a fascinating experience, and while I'm not quite done with the former title due to the game speed and not having nearly as much free time as I did when I played Shield over my winter break, I think I've gotten far enough (literally all that's left for me main story-wise is the Pokemon League) to form some comparisons and opinions.

Here's one of them in the form of a decently spicy take: Pokemon games actually have gotten a bit easier, but it has almost nothing to do with the actual design of trainers and boss fights. I would make a comparison between Cynthia and Leon here but I haven't reached Cynthia yet so I'll instead look at Platinum and Shield's 3rd gym leaders, Fantina and Kabu respectively. In a vacuum, Kabu has a more threatening team; Fantina may have the extremely deadly Mismagius, sure, but her other two team members (Duskull and Haunter) can be annoying but are far less menacing relatively speaking. Meanwhile, Kabu not only has his ace Gigantamax Centiskorch but he also has Arcanine and Ninetales, the former especially being super menacing for the stage in the game you're at. Whereas Fantina has one nuke, Kabu keeps up the fully-evolved pressure consistently at a point where you still may have 1st stage Pokemon in your team, and yet while I had a tough time VS both, Fantina was ultimately harder, making me reset a good 2-3 times before I beat her. There are other examples I could point to like Gardenia VS Nessa and Cyrus VS Rose, but this one stands out to me the most.

Now, there are ways fights themselves are made easier. In Gen 7's case many noted even late-game foes often only have 3 moves rather than 4, but at least to me this is far more crippling on paper than in practice. Platinum also had a bit better AI than usual, notably against Candice where I noticed she made switches quite a bit, and many other trainers made more free switches instead of taking a more rigid approach. But those don't matter as much to me as the main "culprit": Ever since BW2 I'd say, the player has simply been given so many more options to face the challenges placed in front of them. Pokemon selection requires no explanation, comparing older titles to even BW2 or SM, let alone monoliths like XY and SWSH highlights how recent titles have upped the breath and availability of Pokemon of many different useful types and roles to a huge extent. Permanent TMs and the steady phasing out of HMs let your Pokemon have far more coverage and utility than was previously possible, and in SWSH's case TRs courtesy of raid battles, while temporary once again, let you access powerful mid-to-late game moves like Waterfall, Aura Sphere and Dragon Dance earlier than ever before. The level curves and EXP mechanics also keep you much closer to your foes; in Platinum I was consistently 4-6 levels below many key battles, while in SWSH the gap was just 1-3 levels if there was even a gap at all.
 
Ever since BW2 I'd say, the player has simply been given so many more options to face the challenges placed in front of them.
I feel this issue isn't really a "Pokemon-specific" one. Other popular turn based JRPGs (for example SMT/Persona, Valkyria Chronicles, Atelier, Disgaea of which I played recent titles as well as older ones) are progressively stocking up on customization and in-game options.

On a very positive note, this has a huge replayability factor: you can make a lot of playthroughts, potentially countless, using different methods & strategies, and they could all feel fresh.

On a neutral note, for a novice or casual player, this is irrelevant on difficulty side: newcomes to a series are unlikely to be familiar with the game mechanics, so are unlikely to be able to exploit it to the fullest, but will definitely be able to usually find a way to overcome any challenge presented.

On flip side, the ones that get "hurt" so to say are veterans: when you know a series inside out, you know how to break it. The more options are presented, the easier it is to break it and come up with overpowered early combos.


You can often see this reflected in JRPG speedruns, which usually have somewhat rough early games (featuring damage range, RNG rolls, etc), and extremely easy&consistent mid-lategame.


Unfortunately this is a ... I wouldn't say stigma, because it has plenty of positive traits, but definitely a charachteristic of modern turn based games, that offer a lot of complexity, but rarely without a price.

Now, if Pokemon had a postgame comparable to Disgaea... heh :P
 
I'm going to touch today two unpopular opinion about a often contested feature of latest Pokemon games.

I am talking of Experience Share.

The first opinion is that the Exp share has no actual impact on the difficulty of the games, and never did.
The structure of mainline pokemon game, mainly Singles-format battles, heavily rewards sweeping. Before Sword&Shield, once you picked a strong enough pokemon (more often than not, the starter would suffice), you can usually do every single battle in the game just with it (which inevitably also gets overleveled), expecially abusing coverage options you start getting via TMs.
Might need HM slaves obviously or the occasional 2nd pokemon for the odd mandatory double battle, but that's not really a big deal.
The presence of Exp Share has just been a QoL thing if you didn't want to just bruteforce everything with a single pokemon and actually wanted to use a team without resorting to grind wild pokemon. The addition of more affordable and powerful X- items in latest gens further increased this situation.
You can see this in speedruns which generally do the games with 1 pokemon only, occasionally swapping to whatever higher BST they can get at arbitrary points in the game story, and other pokemon just act as sacrifice fodder to use items, or HM slaves.


The second opinion is that the "forced exp share" of generation 8 is also not something new, and that noone ever complained about it in other games while people do for Pokemon just for the sake of complaining of irrelevant stuff.
Well, it is new for Pokemon per se I suppose, but not in videogame industry. If you look at the RPGs that feature a non-fixed party (being it turn based or action based), any time they feature any kind of "experience share", it's also permanently active with no option to turn it off. Sometimes, they have some elegant alternatives, but again, they aren't toggles, they are always there, in same way as gen 8 and Let's Go Exp Share.
I'll quote the latest RPG games I've played myself to show you what I mean.
Kingdom Hearts 3: The non-main-cast party members are largely irrelevant but gain experience whenever they're in party or not, or are at fixed levels for the entire game
Dragon Ball Z Kakarot: The game doesn't feature an exp share, however every character arc it will throw massive amounts of experience to characters you didn't use in previous arc(s) in order to get them at the intended level
Fire Emblem Three Houses: The game doesn't feature a exp share, however allows to teach skill ranks to any cast member "off battle", with exp gains based on actions done rather than simply presence in battle, which allows to make even underleveled cast members relevant in battle without extra effort.
Disgaea 5: The game doesn't feature exp share, however it allows to istantly recruit leveled characters as well as provide super quick catchup mechanisms
Disgaea 4: Same as D5
Nier Automata: All playable characters share levels
Atelier Lulua: The game has built-in exp share
Megadimension Neptunia VII: The game didn't feature a built in exp share outside of 2 characters (which didn't allow to toggle it), allowing you to create optional ones for the others. All characters auto-levelup during story arcs if they are below the intended levels
Megadimension Neptunia VIIR: Non active party gets experience normally, and they auto-levelup during story arcs if they are below the intended levels
Octopath Traveler: the game doesn't feature exp share, however unit level is not a big deal due to the breaking mechanic and the game providing items with massive stat boosts which can make even 40 levels lower party members still functional
Valkyria Chronicles 1 and 4: The levels are class based rather than unit based, meaning every unit of a class shares the same level
Persona 5 & Persona 5 Royal: The game automatically gives you a exp share confidant, which you can optionally improve up to full experience for backup, but not disable.
Senran Kagura Burst Renewal: The game doesn't feature exp share, however provides easy catchup mechanisms and the plot is clearable without any level requirement
Super Neptunia RPG: The game only really has 1 optional character to play, who you can completely skip (as i did). No exp share, however.
Tales of Berseria: The game has built-in exp share
Tales of Vesperia: The game has built-in exp share
Dragon quest XI: The game has built-in exp share
God Eater 3: ...you know I can't actually remind on this one, then again the non-playable cast is largely irrelevant compared to the playable character. Ability points are shared, either ways.
Ni No Kuni 2: The game has built-in exp share
Final Fantasy XII-Zodiac Age: The game has built-in ability point share, though not for experience as far as I remind.
Final Fantasy XV: The game doesn't have editable party.
Death End: ReQuest: The game has built-in exp share
Cyber Dimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online: The game doesn't feature exp share, however what mostly matters is the level of the character you play as and don't really need to ever swap if you don't want to.
Persona 4 Golden: Doesn't feature an exp share for party members.
Persona 3 (FES & portable) Doesn't feature an exp share for party members.
SMT Nocturne: Doesn't feature a exp share for party members, however the fusion system makes "party" experience largely irrelevant.
Phew, that's one long list. You can see I played a lot of stuff lately (most of those games I also have platinum trophy on), and basically everything that isn't 10 year old features a non-toggleable experience share system or some effortless (often non optional) catchup system.


Thus my final point: All the hate/dislike toward the Experience Share item in Pokemon games is just people trying to find pointless reasons to criticize games, when the Experience share
1) Doesn't affect the difficulty of an already simple game
2) Doesn't make the game easier, just less tedious (which is a good thing)
3) Isn't even a Pokemon-unique situation to begin with
 
I'm going to touch today two unpopular opinion about a often contested feature of latest Pokemon games.

I am talking of Experience Share.

The first opinion is that the Exp share has no actual impact on the difficulty of the games, and never did.
The structure of mainline pokemon game, mainly Singles-format battles, heavily rewards sweeping. Before Sword&Shield, once you picked a strong enough pokemon (more often than not, the starter would suffice), you can usually do every single battle in the game just with it (which inevitably also gets overleveled), expecially abusing coverage options you start getting via TMs.
Might need HM slaves obviously or the occasional 2nd pokemon for the odd mandatory double battle, but that's not really a big deal.
The presence of Exp Share has just been a QoL thing if you didn't want to just bruteforce everything with a single pokemon and actually wanted to use a team without resorting to grind wild pokemon. The addition of more affordable and powerful X- items in latest gens further increased this situation.
You can see this in speedruns which generally do the games with 1 pokemon only, occasionally swapping to whatever higher BST they can get at arbitrary points in the game story, and other pokemon just act as sacrifice fodder to use items, or HM slaves.


The second opinion is that the "forced exp share" of generation 8 is also not something new, and that noone ever complained about it in other games while people do for Pokemon just for the sake of complaining of irrelevant stuff.
Well, it is new for Pokemon per se I suppose, but not in videogame industry. If you look at the RPGs that feature a non-fixed party (being it turn based or action based), any time they feature any kind of "experience share", it's also permanently active with no option to turn it off. Sometimes, they have some elegant alternatives, but again, they aren't toggles, they are always there, in same way as gen 8 and Let's Go Exp Share.
I'll quote the latest RPG games I've played myself to show you what I mean.
Kingdom Hearts 3: The non-main-cast party members are largely irrelevant but gain experience whenever they're in party or not, or are at fixed levels for the entire game
Dragon Ball Z Kakarot: The game doesn't feature an exp share, however every character arc it will throw massive amounts of experience to characters you didn't use in previous arc(s) in order to get them at the intended level
Fire Emblem Three Houses: The game doesn't feature a exp share, however allows to teach skill ranks to any cast member "off battle", with exp gains based on actions done rather than simply presence in battle, which allows to make even underleveled cast members relevant in battle without extra effort.
Disgaea 5: The game doesn't feature exp share, however it allows to istantly recruit leveled characters as well as provide super quick catchup mechanisms
Disgaea 4: Same as D5
Nier Automata: All playable characters share levels
Atelier Lulua: The game has built-in exp share
Megadimension Neptunia VII: The game didn't feature a built in exp share outside of 2 characters (which didn't allow to toggle it), allowing you to create optional ones for the others. All characters auto-levelup during story arcs if they are below the intended levels
Megadimension Neptunia VIIR: Non active party gets experience normally, and they auto-levelup during story arcs if they are below the intended levels
Octopath Traveler: the game doesn't feature exp share, however unit level is not a big deal due to the breaking mechanic and the game providing items with massive stat boosts which can make even 40 levels lower party members still functional
Valkyria Chronicles 1 and 4: The levels are class based rather than unit based, meaning every unit of a class shares the same level
Persona 5 & Persona 5 Royal: The game automatically gives you a exp share confidant, which you can optionally improve up to full experience for backup, but not disable.
Senran Kagura Burst Renewal: The game doesn't feature exp share, however provides easy catchup mechanisms and the plot is clearable without any level requirement
Super Neptunia RPG: The game only really has 1 optional character to play, who you can completely skip (as i did). No exp share, however.
Tales of Berseria: The game has built-in exp share
Tales of Vesperia: The game has built-in exp share
Dragon quest XI: The game has built-in exp share
God Eater 3: ...you know I can't actually remind on this one, then again the non-playable cast is largely irrelevant compared to the playable character. Ability points are shared, either ways.
Ni No Kuni 2: The game has built-in exp share
Final Fantasy XII-Zodiac Age: The game has built-in ability point share, though not for experience as far as I remind.
Final Fantasy XV: The game doesn't have editable party.
Death End: ReQuest: The game has built-in exp share
Cyber Dimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online: The game doesn't feature exp share, however what mostly matters is the level of the character you play as and don't really need to ever swap if you don't want to.
Persona 4 Golden: Doesn't feature an exp share for party members.
Persona 3 (FES & portable) Doesn't feature an exp share for party members.
SMT Nocturne: Doesn't feature a exp share for party members, however the fusion system makes "party" experience largely irrelevant.
Phew, that's one long list. You can see I played a lot of stuff lately (most of those games I also have platinum trophy on), and basically everything that isn't 10 year old features a non-toggleable experience share system or some effortless (often non optional) catchup system.


Thus my final point: All the hate/dislike toward the Experience Share item in Pokemon games is just people trying to find pointless reasons to criticize games, when the Experience share
1) Doesn't affect the difficulty of an already simple game
2) Doesn't make the game easier, just less tedious (which is a good thing)
3) Isn't even a Pokemon-unique situation to begin with
I frankly don't understand why some people think the Exp. Share has a significant impact on the game's difficulty.

I mean, sure, it has SOME impact because a higher level means dealing more damage and taking less, but its impact is minimal compared to other aspects of the game. You'd pretty much have to greatly overlevel your opponent (like 10 levels or more) for the level difference to really mean something.

For example, ORAS having very low levels for boss trainers (even lower than those of the originals) is a bigger problem that you overleveling them through the Exp. Share. It's not the item's fault that the difficulty is so low to begin with.
 
The real problem with the exp share for me is that if I get a new team member, it's gonna be spending a lot of time with a gap between it and my other mons' levels due to everyone getting exp at the same time. It's difficult to get it on par when everyone's getting stronger
I can see the issue there, but the flipside is that since generally (bar very rare cases before gen 8 wild area) the wild pokemon were always lower level than your team, sometimes significantly lower level, so you'd have to babysit the pokemon through boring long grinds or backtrack a ton (hi Magikarp, Abra or Ralts expecially).
Instead of having the team get slightly overleveled compared to the new pokemon, you'd have to constantly do swaps and heal up the pokemon instead. I hardly see a difference in impracticality there.

In fact, exp candies in gen 8 are a huge boon for this, as (if not abused) they can istantly bring a newly catched pokemon to the team's level.
 
I can see the issue there, but the flipside is that since generally (bar very rare cases before gen 8 wild area) the wild pokemon were always lower level than your team, sometimes significantly lower level, so you'd have to babysit the pokemon through boring long grinds or backtrack a ton (hi Magikarp, Abra or Ralts expecially).
Instead of having the team get slightly overleveled compared to the new pokemon, you'd have to constantly do swaps and heal up the pokemon instead. I hardly see a difference in impracticality there.

In fact, exp candies in gen 8 are a huge boon for this, as (if not abused) they can istantly bring a newly catched pokemon to the team's level.
Yeah, that's true; and honestly I wasn't even saying it was a big issue. In fact maybe I should also put it in Little Things That Annoy You :p
 
Personally, I don't have a problem with Exp Share during the main game. However, it is very annoying while you are EV training.
That's understandable as well. On positive note, we did get portable boxes in gen 8 and Let's Go (and are likely going to be mainstays) so that's significantly alleviating the issue.

(that said, EV training via pokemon is pretty obnoxious in gen 8 right now, nowhere close to how practical it was in gen 6 and 7. I am finding more effective to just buy medicines for it considering in postgame you easily drown in money due to event raids flooding you with it)
 

Yung Dramps

awesome gaming
Speaking as someone who gets an aneurysm if any of my party members has more than a few levels of difference, EXP Share was fine. Certainly more preferable than tedious grinding like Platinum has made me do thus far a few times.
 
Going back to Gen 4's grind is... difficult. I feel 3 and 5 had by far the best pre-exp share levelling and convenience, though 5's is offset a bit by some of BW's evolution levels.
 
Simply from a role-playing perspective, I dislike always-on Exp. Share because it makes no sense that a pokemon can reach level 100 without ever seeing battle. I find it disingenuous to compare pokemon to other "party-based" RPGs since most of those feature party-based combat, while the vast majority of pokemon campaigns consist of 1-on-1 battles. In past games, keeping your party at consistent levels meant creating opportunities for your weaker pokemon to glean experience, something that becomes completely unnecessary in SWSH. I personally found that my planned party ended up having a "dead weight" pokemon (Thievul), since it was never the optimal choice to deal with an opponent, and could simply coast along for the ride. There is just very little incentive to keep shitmons around without the sunk cost fallacy involved in grinding them up. :smogthink:

I also disagree with the claim that pokemon is stupid easy with or without the Exp Share. It's certain true in gen 6, since there isn't a single difficult battle in either XY or ORAS. However, the Alola leveling curve often leaves you in the dust and offers what are imo the most consistently challenging and fun battles in the mainline series of games (hard mode B2W2 is really the only one that can compete). Being underleveled against totems almost feels like puzzle boss fights and is the closest official pokemon gets to fan-made difficulty hacks.

Overall I just don't think the comparisons Worldie draws justify the removal of the on/off switch for the exp share. Most of the actually good games on their list do in fact allow the player to control party exp through catch-up mechanics or OP skills/equipment. Meanwhile, grinding is never required in pokemon games outside of self-imposed challenges like nuzlockes or monotype runs — and even then, the inconvience is largely overstated, since past games did often feature catch-up mechanics, like the VS Seeker or Audino rustling spots.
 
Simply from a role-playing perspective, I dislike always-on Exp. Share because it makes no sense that a pokemon can reach level 100 without ever seeing battle.
Maybe "max level" wouldn't, but the exp share would simply mean that the pokemon watches the battle and learns from what's going on (which is why usually exp share system provide partial experience rather than full exp) rather than by directly taking place in the action
 
Maybe "max level" wouldn't, but the exp share would simply mean that the pokemon watches the battle and learns from what's going on (which is why usually exp share system provide partial experience rather than full exp) rather than by directly taking place in the action
That's true. I mostly meant that, during the part of the game where I actually care about the "RPG" part of pokemon - aka the main story - I find always-on exp share immersion breaking.
 
I kinda jumped around a lot when I was writing this post, so sorry if it's a little disorganized. Hopefully it's not too hard to follow?

Hello! Obligatory "I mostly lurk and don't post often" (woo, second post!) and I probably won't become a regular in the thread, but I kinda wanted to address this because I think it's pretty misguided and a little unfair.
(First thing:
The second opinion is that the "forced exp share" of generation 8 is also not something new, and that noone ever complained about it in other games while people do for Pokemon just for the sake of complaining of irrelevant stuff.

---

Thus my final point: All the hate/dislike toward the Experience Share item in Pokemon games is just people trying to find pointless reasons to criticize games, when the Experience share
1) Doesn't affect the difficulty of an already simple game
2) Doesn't make the game easier, just less tedious (which is a good thing)
3) Isn't even a Pokemon-unique situation to begin with
It seems like your stance goes beyond just stating your opinion - you're actually saying that you don't think anyone else has a right to hold any other opinion? Which I think is pretty disrespectful, first of all, but it also doesn't seem like you fully understand the reasons people don't like the forced Experience Share in the first place, so I'm just going to focus on that.)



First of all, with respect to difficulty - I think you're just... kind of missing the point?
You raise the point that the games already reward sweeping the game with a single Pokémon, and... I mean, I'm not going to argue that you're wrong - that that's not one of the easiest ways to break the game - but if someone is saying they want the game to be harder, do you honestly think that's how they're going to choose to play in the first place?
Hold that thought, though - I'll touch on difficulty later, but there's something else I should cover first.

At least for me, the biggest issue with the Experience Share isn't really a matter of difficulty at all.
Personally, I'm the kind of player who prefers to raise a balanced team and keep them as close in level as possible. It seems like you're arguing that that's less than optimal, but I don't think that really matters - it's by far the more fun way for me to play.
The Experience Share in Sword and Shield actively works against this in a way that I found incredibly frustrating and limiting, and - although you say it's a reach made up by people who couldn't find any better reasons to complain - I actually found it to be the biggest problem with Shield.

I'm going to start by giving two examples to illustrate how hard it is to close a level gap between team members in this game, but if you already understand this, you can skip over the hide.

Shortly after I fought Milo, I caught a Milcery; she was my fourth team member. Ideally, I would have caught her a bit sooner, but I had mistakenly thought that Milcery were found on the route after Turffield rather than the one before, so she was a few levels lower than the rest of my team right away.
In an attempt to catch her up to the rest of my Pokémon, I made her my lead in every battle, actively avoided using my other Pokémon unless she fainted and my hand was forced. Eventually, she would catch up, and I would have a balanced team, and I would be free to use all of my Pokémon again... right?
The problem is that, while I tried to use her more often specifically so she would get more experience than everyone else, this also meant she was the only one who ever fainted, leaving her the only one not gaining experience from many battles. Given the actual numbers of experience gain with the modern mechanics, for every one time she fainted, she would have to win two more battles completely alone just to bridge the gap - which means that if this weak, unevolved Milcery couldn't consistently do better than a two-to-one win/KO ratio with absolutely no team support, the level gap stayed the same at best and got bigger at worst.
In other words, trying to close the level gap of this Milcery turned three of my four Pokémon from functional team members into "last resort only," with the added frustation of knowing every time I did send one of them out that the level difference was about to get bigger instead of smaller.
This lasted... way longer than it should have. I think it was around the fourth Gym that I just gave up - it was so frustrating to try to play this way that I didn't want to bother any more.
By the time I added my sixth member (allll the way after Melony), my team was finally balanced in levels, and I just gave in and used Rare Candies on the new addition so I wouldn't have to put myself through that again. I never use Rare Candies in any other game, and I always play with the Experience Share off - there's still never any shortage of Experience in the first place, so it's never necessary. The problem here, though, wasn't being too low in level relative to my opponents; it was being too low in level relative to my team and knowing that there was absolutely no way that was going to go away on its own in any reasonable amount of time (and without making me start to hate the Pokémon I was forcing myself to use...).

There's also a second side to the issue: trying to catch the team up to an overleveled team member.
To give some context: while Thievul isn't very strong competitively, it actually has several advantages for an in-game playthrough and ended up being extremely reliable. There aren't many Pokémon that learn Nasty Plot as early as the Nickit line - while many Pokémon can access setup moves through TRs, which is all they need for competitive, there's a huge difference in the context of an in-game playthrough between learning a move with a single-use TR or at level 40 and just getting it naturally at level 22.
I bring this up because it highlights how Thievul is supposed to be used. In an in-game run, if you're using Thievul at all, it's going to be sweeping entire teams by itself; you're not just going to switch it out for no reason.
Because of this, I happened to sweep Allister's entire team with my Thievul, and said Thievul ended up with a level advantage of two or three the rest of my team.
Even following the same "rules" as I did when I was trying to catch up Milcery to the rest of the team - refusing to use that Pokémon unless every other team member went down - that level advantage... literally never went away. I beat Hop's final postgame battle with all of my Pokémon at level 60, except Thievul, who was level 62 instead.
In theory, I could probably have boxed my Thievul for a time until my other Pokémon caught up, so this isn't quite as egregious as how hard it is to catch up a single Pokémon; still, I think it's relevant as a way to illustrate just how heavily the Experience Share enforces any level gaps that happen to arise on their own.

Okay, now that that explanation is out of the way, here's why I think that's a bad thing.
In any other game, if I were raising a full team of six and wanted them to stay balanced in level, I would have to do that by using all of them.
As you might have guessed from the above, my habit is to limit myself to using whichever of my Pokémon are the lowest in level. But in any other game, my other Pokémon aren't moving targets.
Let's say I'm playing Black and White. My whole team is the same level when I beat Clay, but maybe my Dewott is higher in level because it had a type advantage. If, all through Chargestone Cave, I don't use my Dewott... it's pretty quickly going to go from the highest-leveled member to the lowest-leveled member. And that means I geto use it again! My team doesn't have a hierarchy - one team member doesn't stay the strongest or the weakest no matter how little or how much I use it. If I want my Pokémon to be equally strong, the answer is to use them equally.
On the other hand, in Shield... I managed to go all the way from Allister to the end of the postgame using my Thievul as little as I possibly could, and it was never anything less than two levels above the rest of my team?
But... what if Thievul is just fun to use? What if I want to use Thievul? I have more opportunities to use each one of my Pokémon in the first example than in the second - by not using Dewott for a while after Clay, I will eventually reach a point where I am incentivized to use Dewott because it needs to catch up, but by not using Thievul for a while after Allister, I only maintain the exact status quo that's already there. There's no point at which training Thievul can reasonably be my priority any more, because there's no point at which I have any end goal or objective for doing so.
As I've established by now, it's just the opposite: I have a meaningful incentive not to use my Theivul, because doing so makes the goal of a balanced team less attainable. In any other game, this instinct stops me from overusing some Pokémon and underusing others; here, it demands that, leaving poor Thievul in the dust despite it honestly being one of the most enjoyable members of the team to use.

This issue was exacerbated, I think, by the way that TMs and TRs were executed in Sword and Shield (and even, to a lesser extent, by the abundance of single-typed Pokémon).
Most of the new Pokémon have fairly limited movepools by leveling up, making their fighting styles relatively one-dimensional. The aforementioned Milcery, for example, only had two damaging moves - Tackle and Draining Kiss - all the way until level 35. Level 35 is shortly after I had given up anyway, but for what it's worth, even that move was Dazzling Gleam, which is just another Fairy-type move. Even that at least created meaningful choices in battles - when I attack, do I want to do more damage with Dazzling Gleam, or do I want to restore HP with Draining Kiss? - but it still speaks volumes to how little move diversity there is in level-up movepools, especially for single-typed Pokémon.
You know how I mentioned that I was using my other team members as little as possible so Milcery could catch up, so Milcery not only had to win battles but had to win them alone? This wouldn't have been nearly as tedious if Milcery was at least fun and interesting to use, but... well, one of those is STAB, has higher power, comes off of Milcery's higher offensive stat and restores HP, and the other is Tackle, so Milcery really only has one attacking move at all. You're barely even making choices in battle, just using the same move over and over.
Sorry to repeat this phrase so much, but in any other game... that would be the point. I'm not supposed to rely on Milcery for every battle - I'm supposed to want to use my other team members. It adds another layer to the sort of "incentivized rotation" I mentioned earlier - if I have to use every team member at least occasionally, now I get to decide which one would be best to use for each battle rather than just having "this is a good Draining Kiss matchup" and "this is going to defeat Milcery and make it take three times as long to close the level gap."
I think, by this point, it should be clear enough why I think the Experience Share is fundamentally incompatible with my personal playing style.



That said, there is also a tangible effect on difficulty, and I don't think you're right to dismiss that without thinking.
I've already talked about playing styles in one sense, but there's another way in which some players can differ from others: what do you like to do when you're playing?
Personally, I approach Pokémon games from a completionist angle. There are some exceptions to this - for REALLY big side features, I might hold off until postgame... I'm not going to 100% complete Pokéstar Studios before I take the boat to Castelia - but for the most part, I try to do everything as it becomes available rather than rushing through. That means grabbing every item, fighting every Trainer and completing every sidequest.
But there are other perfectly good ways to play. Some people enjoy dodging moving Trainers and avoiding battles - I know I was like this the first time I played, and one of my friends still plays like this. This often gets him into ridiculous scrapes when he's woefully unprepared - but that's just another part of the fun!
For some players, battling is the biggest appeal; some people avoid battles at all cost, instead preferring to explore the region; some people collect every Pokémon as they go; some people get invested in the story, and others couldn't care less; some people wish they could skip to the postgame, and some people think the game ends at the credits...

I can't stress enough that whether the Experience Share is a good thing or not is a matter of playing style, not just a matter of difficulty. What I spent so long describing earlier is the way I personally prefer to play - it's not the way everyone should have to play.
What this illuminates, I think, is that there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all "difficulty" in Pokémon. Giving players a way to modulate it is part of the fun!

Let's consider the example of Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. If you want to break this game, you can...
- spam healing items
- rely on affection benefits
- use Refresh to cure status for free
- use the conveniently placed opportunities to heal
- use the newly buffed X-Items or Roto Boosts
- use the conveniently placed in-game trades as crutches to beat every Totem
But if you don't do all of those things, there's also an incredibly solid foundation for a genuinely challenging campaign. This is important because... well, how hard can you make X and Y? I played with Experience Share off and without using Amie and without buying anything from Poké Marts and without using items in battle and without using the gift Lucario and... there were still pretty much no battles that even made me stop and think, let alone actually beat me.
USUM, on the other hand, don't hold back - they have some of the most brutal, creative and memorable boss fights in the series (pretty much every Totem says hi), boss Trainers are EV-trained, enemies are designed with distinctive battle strategies and weak points other than just type matchups... They just also give so many ways to get around them. If you don't think it's fun to struggle against a boss over and over, the game does everything in its power to let you tap out, but if you choose to embrace the challenge instead, no other game in the series is going to deliver on it as well.
Even then, if you take the time to consider your options, USUM also give you some of the best Pokémon variety in the series, mechanics like infinitely reusable TMs with moves that are actually worth using and early access to competitive items. A boss fight in USUM isn't a wall of stats - it's a puzzle to solve, and the game wants you to be creative to solve it. As much as USUM are criticized for having an overly linear and railroady story, I think people fail to appreciate just how much freedom they give you.
There is no one right way to play USUM. They let you make your run as hard or as easy as you want - and no matter what you decide, they're actually prepared to deliver on it.

With that in mind, where does the Experience Share fall?
As far as I'm concerned, it isn't just a "QOL feature" that benefits everyone - at its best (read: when you can choose whether to have it on or off), it's an equalizer.
When I played Ultra Sun, I had the Experience Share off the entire time... but I still absolutely love the fact that the game offered it as an option. Why? Because my friend had it on the entire time. I fought every Trainer, he fought as few battles as possible... and despite that, we pretty much went into every boss fight at the same level. Every major battle was as memorable for me as it was for him; we could compare and contrast our experiences, laugh together when the same boss crushed us both, laugh at each other when a boss one of us steamrolled gave the other a hard time... It was fantastic.
To me, that's... pretty much what Pokémon is. I know USUM have a bad reputation - and there's definitely quite a lot holding them back I'm definitely in agreement that they messed up the story badly, which is a shame because Sun and Moon had my favorite story in the series - but I can't think of any other game in the series that was quite so much fun to play alongside someone else. For all of their flaws, I think USUM had an incredibly well balanced main campaign.
So there's my unpopular opinion of the day!
Oh, but that's another thing about this - despite our different playing styles, we were generally the same level... because I had the Experience Share off and he had it on. To put that in different terms... if I had turned on the Experience Share, and I otherwise played exactly the same way, I would be a higher level than he was, and I would have an easier time than I did, even though I didn't devote even a minute to level grinding. Hopefully that puts to rest the idea that it somehow doesn't affect difficulty at all.

Anyway, the point I'm slowly trying to make here is this:
I don't think Pokémon as a series is capable of making a one-size-fits-all difficulty curve.
The player base is so split across so many demographics: people of different interests, ages, playing styles... so trying to make the game the same for everyone just doesn't work!
The modern Experience Share in general is actually a good thing, as far as I'm concerned - but the forced experience share is is sort of a symptom of a larger problem. Game Freak wants everyone to play Sword and Shield at the same level, and I just can't fathom why? It's not even all a matter of making it too easy - there are as many apparent attempts at "balancing" or limiting the player's options as bolstering them. They dump all of this extra experience on you whether you want it or not, but they also make Pokémon in the Wild Area give less experience so you're not rewarded at all for triumphing over a tough opponent?
It even gets to be self-defeating at times - the point of the Wild Area is ostensibly its incredible Pokémon variety and the freedom it's supposed to give the player, but instead of actually letting you catch those Pokémon, they impose rigid level caps so you gain access to them as late as ever. And... meanwhile, one of the options they DID deign to allow is... fully evolved Arcanine, before the first Gym, with all of its best moves available for free?
It's not a coincidence that the game with what ought to be the hardest bosses is the one that's easiest to break - it's a justification. The more ways there are for players to get around an obstacle, the safer it is to go all out with the difficulty: Game Freak doesn't have to worry so much that young players will give up on a game thinking that it's too hard if they offer so many ways to make it easier. But with Sword and Shield, they seem to have given up on that - instead of embracing freedom and creativity like they did with USUM, they're trying to give the game only one "balanced" difficulty curve and just doing what they can to make it work the same way for everyone.
It's... not working.



(Lastly: I haven't played all of the games on your list, but I also don't really understand how that's supposed to disprove this point anyway?
No one is comparing Sword and Shield to those games - they're comparing Sword and Shield to other Pokémon games.
From what I can tell, many of the games on your list have completely different gameplay to Pokémon, so I'm not really in a position to judge whether it would be a problem for them in the first place - that said, going by your descriptions, it sounds like several of those perfectly avoid my problem with the mechanic anyway.
Many of your examples are of games that make it easier to close level gaps, games where levels don't matter, games where level gaps don't exist, games that don't put as much emphasis on team customization as Pokémon anyway... and-- "The game doesn't have an editable party?" How is this even an example?
My point is that most of those seem to have specific mechanics that are properly built around shared experience; that doesn't really help Pokémon's case when the problem is that the game isn't built around the same mechanics...)



Tl;dr: Sword and Shield's forced Experience Share is a problem and there are valid reasons to think so.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
 
It seems like your stance goes beyond just stating your opinion - you're actually saying that you don't think anyone else has a right to hold any other opinion? Which I think is pretty disrespectful, first of all, but it also doesn't seem like you fully understand the reasons people don't like the forced Experience Share in the first place, so I'm just going to focus on that.)
I will give you the benefit of mostly lurking there :P

The main reason for which the exp share issue is brought on those boards & dedicated discords is always "It makes the game too easy".
When the games already are easy, and always been.
I have never seen different reasons listed before I posted this topic, and you might have noticed I can agree to them to some extends, but also disagree on hurting the game as it just changes the kind of annoyances you run into.

I do also challenge you in finding a single pokemon game you can't bruteforce by only using a single pokemon.
I'll give you a spoiler, you can't, all speedruns are done in this way.
(Funny enough, one of the reasons for which they do this in gen 6 onwards is to avoid the level up messages from other pokemon in party due to exp share)

First of all, with respect to difficulty - I think you're just... kind of missing the point?
You raise the point that the games already reward sweeping the game with a single Pokémon, and... I mean, I'm not going to argue that you're wrong - that that's not one of the easiest ways to break the game - but if someone is saying they want the game to be harder, do you honestly think that's how they're going to choose to play in the first place?
As much as your opinion there can be agreed on... "giving players the option to make the game harder" isn't something a developer should care for.
Games are usually designed with a specific game pattern in mind, and self-imposed challenges arent included.
If a developer wants to include difficulty options, they do it. And in the case of GameFreaks, they're fine with having relatively easy games, since they're games mainly aimed for kids with some extra content (mainly the competitive scene) for adulter people.
 
I do also challenge you in finding a single pokemon game you can't bruteforce by only using a single pokemon.
I'll give you a spoiler, you can't, all speedruns are done in this way.
Slight caveat to that: apparently it's actually optimal to use a team consisting of two Tentacruel in Platinum, though to my knowledge, no one has gone through the grinding to get WR with the route.
 
I don't think its fully fair to compare pokemon to other JRPGs in terms of experience structure. Many non-pokemon JRPGs do not have levels be the only, or even the largest, factor when it comes to power. Better equipment and more powerful classes/spells are often tied more to progression than exp, where a pokemon's level is the biggest factor in stats (even the effects of EV/IVs scale with level), evolution/class changes, and what moves they have access to. Of the games on Worldie's list that I have played, the biggest power boosts to a specific party member are not shared. I will also bring up Xenoblade 2, where exp-based leveling (shared, but any quest exp is only applied at the player's choice and you can delevel yourself whenever you want in NG+) is so relatively unimportant that you can beat the hardest superboss with a level 1 party with enough skill in handling the other power systems. Potenitally unwanted exp thus has a smaller effect in those other games than in Pokemon.
 
Slight caveat to that: apparently it's actually optimal to use a team consisting of two Tentacruel in Platinum, though to my knowledge, no one has gone through the grinding to get WR with the route.
I heard about it, I believe it's actually just so you don't have to level up so you catch a second one :mehowth:
 
I do also challenge you in finding a single pokemon game you can't bruteforce by only using a single pokemon.
I'll give you a spoiler, you can't, all speedruns are done in this way.
(Funny enough, one of the reasons for which they do this in gen 6 onwards is to avoid the level up messages from other pokemon in party due to exp share)
I'm going to have to ask you to read my post a little bit more closely... I think you'll find that I agreed with you that this is the "optimal" way to play.
That said, you seem to think that every player is only concerned with playing "optimally." This is where you're mistaken.
Let me just reiterate what I already said:
if someone is saying they want the game to be harder, do you honestly think that's how they're going to choose to play in the first place?
Everyone plays the game differently, and even though it is easier to play that way, not many people choose to do so.
This was pretty much the entire point of the latter half of my post, so I'm not going to repeat myself in as much detail, but I think you need to realize that there are a lot more ways to play the campaign of a Pokémon game than doing whatever it takes to win.
Most people raise larger teams... because... they want to raise larger teams. The games are generally balanced under that assumption anyway (consider it this way: if the developers intended for players to use only one Pokémon, doing so wouldn't let you steamroll the game in the first place, because they would have taken it into account).
I think it's safe to say that the people regularly employing speedrun strats to make the game as easy as possible and the people asking for the games to be harder are, if not completely discrete groups, at least generally acting in completely different contexts.
Anyway, are you really arguing that the difficulty of the games hasn't changed at all from Sword and Shield going out of their way to make every other playing style as easy as the easiest playing style, just because "well, at least the easiest playing style itself didn't change?"
One factor that contributes to difficulty in puzzles is the number of solutions - making every method as effective as the one easiest method is absolutely going to affect... well... everyone who wasn't already doing the easiest method.

As much as your opinion there can be agreed on... "giving players the option to make the game harder" isn't something a developer should care for.
Games are usually designed with a specific game pattern in mind, and self-imposed challenges arent included.
If a developer wants to include difficulty options, they do it. And in the case of GameFreaks, they're fine with having relatively easy games, since they're games mainly aimed for kids with some extra content (mainly the competitive scene) for adulter people.
Nnnope.

First objection: if, for a large number of players - enough that it's a common complaint that you felt the need to address? enough that speaking out against that complaint is what you consider an "unpopular" opinion? - the game is less enjoyable because of the change, where do you think you're going to get by saying it's not a factor in the quality of the game?
Aside from that, I think you're missing something crucial: in the shift from Generation VII to Generation VIII, the Experience Share didn't get any better for anyone. If someone already played Generation VII with the Experience Share on, its effect on their gameplay is the same as it was, so there's no reason to see this as a move to appeal more to that kind of player. On the other hand, it tangibly got worse for the people who didn't like it. If someone played Generation VII with the option to have the Experience Share on or off, and they made the choice for themself that they preferred to have it off, telling them "no, actually you can't turn it off any more" is a bad thing.
You seem to think that making the Experience Share mandatory is intended as a way to make the game better for children, but the change actually doesn't affect those children at all - it's not any better for them than it was. This isn't a trade, making the game more appealing for kids at adults' expense. It's making the game more appealing for no one at some players' expense.
It seems like you're trying to say "they're not kids, so whether they enjoy the game doesn't matter," but I simply can't get behind that. If they have enjoyed every other game up until this change... and now they're being bluntly told "wait, we just remembered that you're not the target audience, so we won't support you any more..." that's incredibly alienating. I don't understand why you think that that gives people less of a right to be upset - if anything, I think it's more reason.
Nobody is complaining about this because they want to have a harder campaign at everyone else's expense. They just... want to have fun playing Pokémon. They could before, and now they can't - they're being excluded from something they like. Why are you acting like they don't have a right to care?
It's not like this is a zero sum game! Both kinds of players can be allowed to have their fun at once, without coming into conflict, just by making it optional.
... Like it already was.

Second objection: they actually do intend for more advanced players to modulate their own difficulty.
"Are there other features to make the game more difficult for experienced players?
Ohmori: There are no direct difficulty levels in Sword and Shield, but we always think about different options to experience the game. If players really want to make it difficult for themselves, they can bring fewer Pokémon into their party, or a team with only one type."
(For what it's worth, this is also more proof that a solo run isn't somehow the "default assumption" for every player just because it's optimal for speedrunning. Ohmori is citing using fewer Pokémon as an alternative to playing the games normally - not only that, but he's suggesting that it might be a way to make the game harder. I'm with you that it is the easiest way to play, but that just doesn't mean that the ideal is to balance the game with the assumption that it's what everyone is going to do, not caring about anyone else.)
 

Yung Dramps

awesome gaming
Allow me to detract from this little back-and-forth a bit with another one of my opinions which falls into the "I dunno if this is really a hot take or not" gray area, although there's a good chance it isn't since it's sort of an extension of the complaints about USUM butchering the originals' plot; Ultra Necrozma is a wholly inferior "final boss" to the legendary plot than Mother Beast Lusamine in pretty much every way. Lemme do a bullet point breakdown rq:

Dramatic Tension: PFFFFFFFT HAHAHAHAHAHAHA IT'S NOT EVEN CLOSE. Yeah sure getting to fight big scary monster guy is kinda cool, but fighting the culmination of the insanity of the main supporting character's mother is the kind of relatively smaller but much more personal stakes that Pokemon does really well at. The build-up was also a lot better since you get to interact with Lusamine and her children many times before unlike Necrozma plopping in much later relatively speaking.

Music: This one's minor and the most subjective since a lot of people really liked Ultra Necrozma's theme, but honestly I dunno it just doesn't do much for me and I love most of Gen 7's music and Pokemon music in general. Mother Beast's theme is slow, bizarre and haunting, which to me is a lot more unique.

The Fight Itself: Honestly probably the biggest downgrade. A while back I ragged on Lusamine's team (I even went so far as to call it "the worst main villain team since OG RSE Maxie and Archie", something which I sincerely regret saying), but y'know what? Since then I've grown a lot more fond of it, it's a neat little subversion after all 3 previous villains went for pretty typical "mean-looking" mons for the most part, I even appreciate choices like Clefable and Bewear, you go girl! As for Ultra Necrozma, its main defining characteristic to those who have faced him is its difficulty. But this is not real difficulty like, say, the final Cyrus fight in Platinum, one of my favorite bosses in the entire series for whom the bulk of his challenge came from his very dangerous, well-rounded team and a level gap between the player and him which gave him a useful but not excessive edge. No, this is Red-tier artificial difficulty: Instead of a reasonably powerful team or clever strategy like the Totem battles, Ultra Necrozma is an 11 level spike from the previous non-Necrozma boss with +1 to all stats who spams his big strong scary moves, cleaving through your entire party who simply cannot withstand the blows or do sufficient damage back. It really says something to me that whenever I look on discussions about this boss the only strategies I see recommended are cheesy stuff like X Item spam or gaming the AI with Zoroark. This is the kind of horseshit I expect from one of those extremely poorly balanced "hardcore" Pokemon ROM hacks with unreasonable difficulty spikes like Snakewood, not an official Game Freak product!
 
I don't think its fully fair to compare pokemon to other JRPGs in terms of experience structure. Many non-pokemon JRPGs do not have levels be the only, or even the largest, factor when it comes to power. Better equipment and more powerful classes/spells are often tied more to progression than exp, where a pokemon's level is the biggest factor in stats (even the effects of EV/IVs scale with level), evolution/class changes, and what moves they have access to. Of the games on Worldie's list that I have played, the biggest power boosts to a specific party member are not shared. I will also bring up Xenoblade 2, where exp-based leveling (shared, but any quest exp is only applied at the player's choice and you can delevel yourself whenever you want in NG+) is so relatively unimportant that you can beat the hardest superboss with a level 1 party with enough skill in handling the other power systems. Potenitally unwanted exp thus has a smaller effect in those other games than in Pokemon.
Also, wanting to add more to that, bosses in other JRPGs are given skills and abilities players don’t have access to. In Fire Emblem: 3 Houses, the Bosses have Infinite magic use, while DragonQuest 11, bosses can take two actions in a turn. In Pokémon, not only do the bosses have equal advantages, they have arguably have less. 0 IVs, no EVs, and less than 4 movesets to save the least.
 
Also, wanting to add more to that, bosses in other JRPGs are given skills and abilities players don’t have access to. In Fire Emblem: 3 Houses, the Bosses have Infinite magic use, while DragonQuest 11, bosses can take two actions in a turn. In Pokémon, not only do the bosses have equal advantages, they have arguably have less. 0 IVs, no EVs, and less than 4 movesets to save the least.
...which further points to what I refer with "the games are both so easy and so exploitable that exp share has no impact on the difficulty anyway"
 
Why defend Gamefreak's awful regressions with Stockholm syndrome? It just screams "please give us less quality games with less content, but higher prices!". (I will concede though that Gamefreak seemingly cutting the third version crap and just making DLC is an improvement from the past.) Seriously, sometimes I can't get people.....

Anyways, my stance on the Gen 6+ Exp. Share is that it's fine.....but only after you beat the postgame plot. It shouldn't be available before that point as to make you have to work a tad in the main game and the like. However, after you beat the postgame plot, you're probably going to want to raise Pokemon for competitive play or other reasons....why make you have to go through that grind again? To help with training weaker Mons in the main game and such, the Gens 2-5 Exp. Share (with it taking its rightful name) would make a return. And again, you'd get the modern Exp. Share, rebranded as the Exp. All (as it works more like that anyways), after completing the postgame plot. Toggle and all.
 
(Ah, yikes - I think I got overly invested in arguing and may have been more intense about it than I should have. I didn't realize how strongly I must have been coming off, but looking it over again, I feel like my second post was pretty aggressive and pointed. I'm sorry about that... I hope I wasn't too rude.)

Uh, about Necrozma, though! I definitely agree with you that Lusamine was better on the narrative front, and I also mostly agree that the Ultra Necrozma boss fight wasn't executed very well at all - to be honest, I've always thought of it as the one badly done boss in USUM, and I found it pretty disappointing as the climax of a game that otherwise did so well.
That said, I was analyzing it pretty recently, and I realized some things that... well, they didn't exactly redeem the battle, and I still think it could have been executed much better than it was, but I did think that it gave a better picture of what Game Freak might have been trying to accomplish? I dunno! I thought someone here might find it interesting.
While Necrozma is mostly a sheer numbers battle, and it does have a really boring four-attacks moveset with no apparent strategy, there actually is a sort of "theme" behind it - one that's even designed to be exploitable and come with meaningful weaknesses - that makes me think it was more carefully planned than that. The execution was definitely way off, to the point that the fight was just jarring and out of place, but I think this is what sets it apart (or at least was supposed to set it apart...) from all of those badly balanced difficulty hacks.

The theme of the Ultra Necrozma battle is... super effective moves.
Okay, okay, I know that sounds like a cheap way to ascribe meaning to something as mundane as "the boss has type coverage like every other boss," but hear me out:
Ultra Necrozma's signature Ability is Neuroforce, which boosts the power of super effective moves by 25%... on top of their existing double damage, making the modifier 2.5 times. You could read that as "Necrozma's fantastic coverage gives it even more of an advantage in raw numbers," but it also means something else: there's a wider gap between Necrozma's super effective moves and its neutral or resisted moves than any other Pokémon.
This wouldn't mean that much if Necrozma could actually hit everything super effectively, but there's a pretty major hole in its type coverage: Psychic, Dragon, Rock, Steel... all four of these types are resisted by Steel. That means that there's not a single Steel-type, even a dual-type, that Ultra Necrozma can hit super effectively, and if your Steel-type is lucky enough not to have a secondary type with a weakness, it's only taking about 20% of the damage that any other Pokémon takes in this fight.
Particularly when you're already designing a boss around type coverage, I don't think this is something that happens by accident. Necrozma has plenty of options to hit Steel-types. If it replaced Power Gem with, say, Earthquake, the only Pokémon that the player could possibly have to resist it at this point is Skarmory. In fact, if it used Heat Wave instead, there wouldn't be a single Pokémon in Alola that could resist all four of its moves - I think the only Pokémon that resists that combination at all is Flash Fire Heatran. It's not like this is something that's hard to figure out when you're designing a boss - there are even resources that calculate this automatically. If Game Freak wanted Ultra Necrozma to be ridiculously hard to counter, they could have done it easily!
I don't know that there's any easy way to take advantage of this without already having raised a Steel-type, of course, so it's a pretty limiting solution on its own. That said, I bring this up because I've seen someone attest that their Alolan Dugtrio of all things was able to avoid being one-hit KOed - Alolan Dugtrio, a Pokémon with 35/70 bulk! On one hand, it does look like it takes just enough EV investment that I don't think it would reliably happen just by accident - if we suppose the Dugtrio has "average" stats (15 IVs/85 EVs) in both HP and Special Defense, it doesn't reliably take a Photon Geyser until level 57, so you kinda have to get lucky with a good Dugtrio or you're stuck level grinding anyway - but I think it sort of speaks to Game Freak's intentions with the fight: Steel-types in general, even seemingly frail ones, are supposed to be a weakness of Ultra Necrozma.

Not everyone is going to have a Steel-type, though, and there are a lot of other ways people have found to approach the fight - even cheap ways that seem more like oversights than intentional win conditions. But then... let's think about what those actually are.
If we assume Necrozma's objective at any given moment is "use a super effective move," what ways are there to play around that?
The first thing that came to mind was to prevent Necrozma from doing what it wanted - using a Steel-type to guarantee it no super effective options.
But for another option, you could exploit what Necrozma wants - this is what the Zoroark strategy and the Primarina/Alolan Muk strategies both do. If Necrozma is thinking in terms of sheer damage output, then once you know its moves, you also know exactly what move it's going to use on any given turn, and then you can take advantage of it. Side note: its moves all have different base powers, so even in situations where none of them are super effective, the AI is still perfectly consistent and therefore predictable rather than ever being random. Given a tie in type effectiveness, its first choice is always Photon Geyser, and its second choice is always Dragon Pulse - the two moves that can be exploited with immunities - while it only ever uses the more reliable Power Gem and Smart Strike if they have a better type matchup against the immediate opponent. Admittedly, I think it might be a stretch to assume that this was something they did on purpose, but it certainly contributes to the reliability of some notable solutions, so I think it's worth mentioning!
The notable thing about the Zoroark exploit is that... I actually don't think that was an accident! Game Freak shows you that very strategy earlier in the game - specifically with a combination of Zorua and a Poison-type, the exact pairing used to exploit Necrozma - and it's in a mandatory battle that you can't miss: Gladion's debut on Akala Island.
(If we want to be really thorough, I'm also sort of inclined to add... you know the type effectiveness indicator when you're choosing a move? That only triggers if you've already seen the Pokémon once, right? But Zubat appears in another mandatory battle - with the Team Skull Grunt you fight in Hau'oli City, which is before Gladion - which also guarantees that the game will be giving you effectiveness indicators on the disguised Zorua. I think this adds even more to that battle's effectiveness as a tutorial!)

But both of these solutions are reliant, to some extent, on players having chosen the right Pokémon for their teams.
The Steel-type solution doesn't work with just any Steel-type you can catch from the wild - even the wild Skarmory in Vast Poni Canyon do go down in one hit (and I'm not in a position to test what Necrozma's AI prioritizes in that situation, but I know Photon Geyser oneshots through Sturdy if the game properly accounts for that - I'm curious to know if it would be misled to use Power Gem instead, but I don't know if we can call that a reliable enough solution) - so you're basically forced to have already been raising a Steel-type if you want that to work.
Meanwhile, the Zorua solution... actually should still work if you're willing to go out of your way - even a low-leveled, freshly caught Zorua from the Trainer's School should be able to use Toxic once, and that's more or less all it takes - but now you're dedicating two slots of your team and an intentionally cheap strategy to taking down one boss, and most players would rather be able to triumph with the team they actually have.
So here's the last main solution! There are a couple of things that I think are really good about it, but there's also a big problem that I think made it less ideal than it might have been.
We have Steel-types, which can prevent Necrozma from doing what it wants - there's no way at all for it to hit them with a super effective move. We have Zorua, which can exploit what Necrozma wants to do - its instinct to use a super effective move will be its downfall. And then we have... the brute force solution: letting Necrozma do exactly what it wants and just winning anyway.
I'm talking, of course (?), about the Focus Sash from Dancer Julia.
First are the things I like about this:
- The actual "solution" is fairly unique - Necrozma is the only major boss fight that amounts to a single Pokémon if you count the URS, you're wrong Poipole is immune to Toxic anyway. It's not a Trainer who can switch out or cure status, and it's not a Totem Pokémon with an ally... it's by itself! That means that there's no other fight where use Toxic once is a guaranteed win, and there's no way for you not to survive for one turn if you have the Focus Sash. If you have a full team, even better - you don't have to live a single hit after that, because it only takes six turns for poison to take out Necrozma, and it wastes two of them on your first Pokémon.
- Every player can take advantage of it! Unless you've inexplicably decided to raise a full team of Pokémon with Klutz (and there are only three of them in Alola, so you'd have to be going out of your way...), at least one of your Pokémon can use a Focus Sash to take a hit, and the only Pokémon that can't learn Toxic are Ditto (which... if this is your only Pokémon, and it doesn't even have Impostor, you have bigger problems! but also you can at least use the free turn to Transform, I guess?), will have evolved well before this point (Metapod, Kakuna, Beldum at least into Metang, Scatterbug...) or aren't even possible to obtain by this point without trading (Magearna, Wobbuffet, Unown...).
- Dancer Julia is placed at the beginning of Poni Island, so I would say she's close enough to count as "convenient weakness placement" even if there are some other fights in between. The Focus Sash you got might even still be fresh in your mind when you get to this point!
Necrozma is also even built to minimize the influence of RNG. If you do go into the battle with a plan, and it's a plan that should reasonably work, a stroke of bad luck isn't going. In fairness, there's no real way for Game Freak to design a boss not to get a critical hit, so that's always going to be a possibility - but none of Necrozma's moves have secondary effects, and all of them have 100% accuracy. If you're trying to use, say, a Focus Sash to secure a turn... there's actually no way for that to go wrong!
This is another thing that I think we should assume is deliberate - even setting aside type coverage, if Game Freak just wanted to make Necrozma as optimized as possible and just throw wrenches into every conceivable plan, there would have been nothing stopping them from giving it Iron Head (100% accuracy, 80 power and a 30% chance to flinch) rather than Smart Strike (infallible accuracy, but only 70 power and no side effect), since both of them are in its moveset (and neither of them is learned by level, so even that wasn't a factor).
As long as you know exactly what to do, there's almost no way for this strategy to fail you!
But on the other hand... the Focus Sash is a consumable resource that most people won't want to waste on a single boss fight.
There's also the fact that, if your team doesn't include a Poison-type, there's a small chance (10%) that Toxic will miss, and there's no way to get another Focus Sash before postgame.
TM06 is also easy to miss, and there's no point at which the game goes out of its way to teach you about it like Gladion does - you don't even get it from an NPC who would explain its effect like some other TMs. If you're a new player, I feel like this solution is just something you couldn't reasonably be expected to discover for yourself, which is a shame when the rest of the game does have all of those options I mentioned specifically to be new-player-friendly.

I find myself appreciating Ultra Necrozma a lot more than I did at first after thinking through all of these situations - it's honestly much tamer of a "sheer numbers boss" than I thought, and you can sort of tell that Game Freak at least tried to make sure every player could cover it.
I actually also think it's fascinating design to have a boss where - no matter what right answer you choose - you're always going to think "ha, there's no way that's how I was supposed to beat it!" It's basically a trick to make players feel clever, like they didn't just beat the boss but do something even the developer didn't foresee... even if it's secretly exactly what they were supposed to do.

But all the same, I don't think it makes for an ideal final boss. As a one-off, optional gimmick fight, something like this would be fantastic, but I feel like a major story boss like this is exactly the time when players should be putting their own beloved team in the spotlight, and the way Necrozma is set up as a fight just isn't conducive to that. Pretty much all of these viable solutions are carried by one Pokémon - even when you win, it's because one of your Pokémon lived one hit and struck back with one hit of its own, and most of your team isn't contributing at all.
I think that's where the fight falls short the most, and I definitely agree that Lusamine felt more climactic for that reason on a gameplay level (on top of the obvious narrative level).

Still, I just thought an analysis like this might be interesting! Even though Necrozma didn't work too well in the end, I always love looking into the reasons behind stuff like this, so maybe someone else will feel the same?
 

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