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Was there ever a gen where the optimal strategy for beating the game wasn't to just overlevel your starter and whatever XP shared or legendary pokemon that you felt like using for either double battles or fighting whatever your starter struggles with?
To give two easy examples, gen 1 had such poor and unpredictable move pools that you couldn't risk training up anything other than what you already knew was good (e.g. most of the Rock/Ground pokemon don't even learn Rock/Ground moves) and Zapdos was, on top of already being a great 'mon, ridiculously overleveled by the time that you got him, making it barely ever worth training anything else. Gen 2 was also a similar case, although that was more down to its notoriously underleveled wilds than anything else.
