>>26637067There's also the fact that Gen I was absolutely broken in a number of programming and fundamental design areas. I need to give it a replay just to see how weird it really was, I don't remember much of the specifics of my experience with it as a kid.
But I do remember the "difficulty" of Pokemon has always come from either how ass backwards a lot of old mechanics were and the tedium of grinding. Looking back, every gen since the first has made things more sensible and thus easier, since you're no longer needing to wrestle with whatever crazy logic was driving some design decisions. Not that it was ever "hard," but the game certainly had a lot more nonsensical barriers in between you and actually playing the damn thing. And the games are still bizarrely obfuscating with how they work.
That people think a quest log function is making the games too easy says a lot about how difficult Pokemon is on a fundamental level, once you get beyond its bizarre quirks that don't add much to the game play itself.
On the flip side, that a broken mess of a game like Pokemon managed to become the second best selling game series in the entire world, and the best seller is decades older too, is a testament to what people really care about: the Pokemon and Pokemon world themselves. That's why Rotom Pokedex is advertised so early. It's a new Pokemon interaction thing, and it's Pokemon that sells the series, not battle frontier or PWT, fun as those are.
