Just beat Cynthia on my playthrough. All in all, the difficulty in her fight did NOT disappoint; even with my team being comparably levelled with hers and with affection bonuses popping off every five seconds, it was still a tough time. Milotic in particular definitely gave my team a run for their money - I THOUGHT Wild Charge Electivire would be a good enough answer for it, but then Marvel Scale kicked in and I had to improvise - and not a single one of her mons went down without a fight. (I should mention that I've been playing this game in "Set" mode the whole time seeing as that's the closest it has to a difficulty setting.) I ended up using all of my mons in the end - even Rampardos got to land the finishing blow on her Garchomp, surprisingly. Shoutouts to Spiritomb for being my hard carry throughout the League, dealing with stuff like Gastrodon when no one else could. (A Grass-type is definitely in order on a future playthrough to deal with those bulky Water/Grounds... not like there are many good options in this game bar Roserade.)
This game definitely does have a HGSS problem where the vast majority of the game is an absolute curbstomp up until around Victory Road where the level curve finally gets up to speed and the trainers start carrying good Pokemon. I'm not exaggerating when I say that from Gardenia onward till around the Elite 4, my team was consistently ~10-20 levels ahead of every trainer's Pokemon. (In the most egregious of cases, the route trainers' Pokemon were around half the level of my LOWEST levelled party member, and I wasn't even going out of my way to grind!) It actually got to a point where I was genuinely surprised whenever a trainer Pokemon WOULDN'T get one-shotted. It's kind of depressing. I do partially blame EXP Share for this, since it seems a lot of the trainers didn't have their levels compensated for its addition. It's not as bad as in HGSS where the level jump is just completely unfair and you will NEED to grind even if you've been battling every single trainer, but still, I wish the level curve in these games could've been managed a little better. I'm not playing Pokemon for a tough time or anything, but stuff like the mandatory EXP Share and the borderline unavoidable affection bonuses have me yearning for something more.
But yeah, I really liked these remakes. I haven't experienced any of the postgame stuff yet, but I'm 44 hours in and I'm loving pretty much all of what I've played of it so far, wonky difficulty curve and forced easy-mode features notwithstanding. The game looks stellar, the remixes are all great, the expanded teambuilding options via the Underground are nice (even if I wish they did a bit more in that regard - I miss Rotom and Porygon-Z), playing through Sinnoh with no HMs is a dream come true, it's pretty much everything I wanted out of a Gen 4 remake. Solid 9/10 IMO, definitely in contention for being the best 3D Pokemon game. I look forward to tackling those Gym Leader and E4 rematches if they're anywhere near as tough as Cynthia was!
(Oh, and whoever said Mamoswine gets Earthquake at level 30 in this game is a BITCH-ass liar. It gets it at level 51 just like in SwSh.)
