>>53130820Maybe it gets better with the liberal use of X-Items and items-in-battle, but I tried to avoid doing that as much as possible because I was trying to see how “easy” the game was. Which brings me to my next point: how easy is Pokémon REALLY? Maybe some ideal set-up exists for Blaziken that makes creaming the Elite Four and Champion a breeze. Maybe if I learned Slash or deleted Peck for Overheat instead of Sky Uppercut, I’d have had an easier time. Maybe if I got a specific item, or grabbed a TM, it would have been easier. Maybe I missed a few trainers at sea or in a cave or off the beaten path somewhere. I definitely didn’t do every double battle. Maybe the extra levels would have helped. But does it really matter? If I needed to do that stuff, if I had to go out of my way to prepare by hunt down specific items, how easy was the challenge? If I had to heal, or pop an X-Item, how easy was the challenge? I still had to use my head to win. I had to read, contextualize, and think.
Phoebe would have been much easier with any other Pokémon, to shake Curse. Drake would have been much easier with a Rock-type, or an Electric-type, and Wallace would have been a lot easier with a Grass-type on my team. I caught a Tropius. I deleted its Razor Leaf since I wasn’t going to fight with it anyway, but that’s just one example of a Pokémon that would have been a big help. I could have caught an Oddish, Roselia, Shroomish, or even an Electrike, and given it the EXP. Share, and not had this problem. It would have been much less demanding to just switch out. If I had something to switch out to. So there actually is a practical incentive to use more than one Pokémon: type coverage. The player learns this as soon as they learn different Pokémon have different types. I was more than 10 levels higher than Wallace’s strongest Pokémon and it didn’t matter. He was still one-shotting me. (2/3)
