Even knowing everything and doing stuff like grit you're still gonna get owned by an unevolved pokemon 10 levels lower than you
On one hand I appreciate the attempt to tweak the balance like this, in practice more akin to more traditional RPGs where the enemies are designed to deal more damage since its not meant to be an equal playing field, on the other hand it sure feels real off, like there's never a point where you can have it let up and the trainer battles that are there become about "you WILL lose pokemon and have to rely on revenge kills". To me it never fills that fulfilling
Honestly I feel like Abilities being in the game would have gone a long way to help even this out. OR if it used the traditional turn system instead
I do understand that it can feel poorly balanced, though I think this is another attempt from GF to create some sort of ""level scaling"" to the game, to try and prevent from just "grinding to victory".
SwSh had a pair of these iterations if you think of it, with Wild Area pokemon scaling to the part of the plot where you are, and Isle of Armor DLC also changing levels on trainers based on your level.
I don't mind the Arceus one too much, I almost like it, albeith I do feel that they should have gone a bit less hard on "nerfing" the level differences.
I do appreciate however that they keep iterating on it: one of the main problems of turn based games (and thus, Pokemon) is that most of the time any roadblock can just be bruteforced by leveling.
Bearing in mind level scaling can also go awfully wrong (see one of the most infamous examples, Final Fantasy 8, which was probably the most known example of how to *not* do level scaling), but I think GF's approach is very promising, and I would like to see more of these in the coming games (mainline or not): having a coherent way to prevent overleveling can also open to have more strategy in the trainers' rosters that doesn't become irrelevant because your starter is 10 levels higher and roflstomps them anyway (aka, the BDSP issue notably).
(also yes, I do agree abilities would have added a interesting strategic layer to Arceus, but I suspect some of them would have been just weird to implement or even "see without previous knowledge" and that was why they got skipped)