>>33949756yeah
reborn catches a lot of flak for its story, but it actually shakes up the gameplay mechanics in a meaningful way by (1) making pokemon (specifically decent-to-good pokes) harder to come by and (2) implementing a hard level cap based on gym badges so that you can't just power through the game by overlevelling one team of pokes
some of the battles are designed to be brutally unfair, but it just makes you feel that much more accomplished when you finagle a win out of your limited arsenal
it's unclear how much of this was an intentional design choice though
