>>48397417>>48400396>>48401195Ok, giving it my best shot here.
Basic themes of the gym are change, deception, flexibility. All of these pokemon are not exactly what you'd call "tournament viable", but they all have a wide array of possible options. The gym leader's not super interested in fighting hard, he's interested in fighting creatively.
The gym is semi-randomized based on your trainer seed, a set of 4 or 5 pre-leader rooms that all have different art and different trainers, selected from a large pool of options for both. The trainers tend to have a lot of neat little berries and items attached to their Normal-types to add variety, and their Pokemon frequently have unusual TM and breeding moves. This may make them stronger, or weaker, versus the challenger.
The leader also looks different depending on the trainer ID seed, dyeing his hair different colors, wearing different contact lenses, and changing outfits. All of his pokemon have an oddball assortment of moves and held items, but he forgoes the potions that Gym leaders sometimes use. If it's not totally illegal to do so, he will also nickname his pokemon and randomly scramble their deployment order, in order to further conceal things from the trainer.
Power only really comes in at the very end with Silvally with a randomly selected type item, and at the very beginning Eevee shows up to play with the young trainers and have a good time. Post-game the leader will do repeat battles, a secretary at the front of the gym will ask the player to pick from a list of options for type/move/terrain preferences, and the leader's pokemon will shift to let the player practice against that focus as best he can. Smeargle in particular will have a wildly varying array of moves.
Probably the player will blow right through this leader with brute force, but there's always a chance the leader happens to have the perfect counterplay available, so the player can never truly be sure they're safe.
Thoughts?
