Cynthia's team excels far and beyond within Sinnoh's context: Spiritomb being a tank with no weaknesses, Lucario with high mixed offenses and good movepool, Togekiss being another strong special tank, Milotic which I remind you was the PREVIOUS GAME'S CHAMPION'S ACE god what a flex move, and Garchomp. Roserade and Gastrodon are kinda whatever but the point is that the game is challenging your with some of the best Sinnoh has to offer, while Geeta (and I could say Nemona too if you count her as the true champion fight) fails at that.
Spiritomb is also more than just a tank. It can be *very* disruptive and debilitating.
Someone here brought up how disrupting stat-boosting sweepers with a lead is very good for Pokémon boss design, and they're right.
Spiritomb can put mons on timers with moves like Wisp and Curse and generally cause a lot of trouble on that front. It can also, as it did in the anime vs Ash, click Destiny Bond and oops, you're cooked lol.
It could be a pretty damn good lead if they
really wanted to be evil with it, but just not having weaknesses
shut up Sylveon is already a big switch-up.
you guys are overhyping milotic too much imo. its stats are fine but even within sinnohs context it has an awful awful tendency to just spam mirror coat to the point that baiting it after spiritomb can guarantee sweep because you can just spam setup in front of it (and unless you got chimchar that setup mon is Not going to be a fire type). it only ever uses ice beam if you put a torterra or gliscor in front of it. this is even worse in a casual run bc milotic completely halts any progress cynthia makes by letting the player spam heals on every mon without worrying too much about the guy thats sitting in front of it
That's more of an AI limitation though, but the whole discussion is based on AI improvements lol.
I'd say that rather than overhyping Milotic in comparison (It's nothing special in Wallace's team, for example), I just don't have a lot of respect for Lucario and Garchomp. Especially not Lucario. Thing couldn't make an impression as an ace when the player has way fewer tools, there was no chance it could be hype in the champion fight.
To be fair, Wallace's Milotic is unimpressive because it's a 6th Water-type with Ice coverage on his team.
Wallace was a horrible Champion, it really was a tremendous mistake to promote him in Emerald.
Remind me why exactly do you find interesting to add to an easy game a artificial difficulty of "I need to read the movesets on bulbapedia beforehand and then still faceroll it because the combat system is flawed" again?
It's turn based games. You can't make them hard. You can just increase the amount of previous knowledge/grinding you need to beat it. There will never be a "execution" component, because in the end Pokemon will always boil to "i click A, you click B, and something happens".
Turn based combat system will never let to real difficulty when it's going against AI, unless you make the AI cheat, or worse, act randomly, and even then it's not difficulty anymore it's just making it frustrating.
Even romhacks that go super hard into making the game extremely challenging by giving NPC proper AI and movesets have to go changing the game systems to do so (forcing level caps for example) and STILL need player-imposed challenges like Nuzlocke and permadeath rules to be hard and not just "well I just save before the boss and worst case i reload if I miss or get crit or something". There's a very popular romhack lately of which I kinda forgot the name, which does all of this, and players do need to read movesets and carefully plan every turn, but in the end the only thing that does make it difficult is the self imposed nuzlocke + hardcore ruleset. Otherwise it'd be your bread and butter JRPG experience of "save in front of boss, try, if you die try again with another team".
Hot take:
Difficulty isn't created by increasing previous knowledge required nor by increasing grinding.
Both are artificial difficulty, because the first means that all it takes is a bulbapedia page and all challenge disappears, and the latter isn't difficulty it's just making it tedious for no reason.
It's created by making *execution* difficult. And that just can't happen in pokemon games, due to how the combat system is designed.
A easy example is the latest GOTY, Expedition 33 (great game btw, you should play it). Despite being a turn based game, it does have an actual execution pressure during the turns, because if you fail to hit the triggers on your turns, your damage is lower or sometimes the attack actually fails, and failing the triggers during enemy turns expecially at higher difficulties can be a instant game over (while still punishing you at lower difficulties).
Another less extreme example? Take the last 2 Yakuza games, Like A Dragon and Infinite Wealth. Their take on turn based combat adds not only in combat triggers, but also non-predictable movement on field. At any given time you're required to consider the position of your characters AND the enemies to lineup knockbacks and aoe attacks, as well as both attack and guard inputs that can add extra effects to your moves / almost completely deny the damage of opponents.
Pokemon? No. It can't be hard. Not with this combat system. You can make it more tedious. You can't make it harder.
Good post,
Indeed, you can't make a Pokémon game truly
hard. Unless you're willing to do ridiculous stuff like HGSS Lance throwing a Lv. 50 DNite with Outrage and telling you to deal with it with shitmons at 5~7 levels lower at best.
You can, however, make it
harder in a non-tedious way.
For example, this is Opal's lead in SwSh:
And you might unironically have stat boosts against that for answering her quiz correctly. Also, it's SwSh, so you have several ways of just facerolling leaders.
It's quite frankly not possible to convince me that this cannot be made harder, or more importantly, more engaging. Tackle as coverage on Lv. 36 is diabolical.
Romhacks usually go too far in the other direction, becoming grindfests with competitive movesets, but this is also unacceptable. It's not just trivial, it's a Cut tree in battle form.
A big part of the discussion is not just about difficulty. It's lack of flavor. You can have easy but engaging bosses. Again, I'll reach for Tate and Liza as an example
None of these pokémon are competitive superstars, they have no EVs whatsoever, their natures are likely unoptimal too, and they even fail to have 31 IVs.
However, they turn out to make for an engaging battle, one that encourages players to actually think instead of mashing A on a super-effective attack. Also, they actually have respectable STAB options for that point in the game. Some of them even have coverage options.
So yes, it's not possible to make a Pokémon game truly hard, but they can have much better designed bosses.
