>>34070791Game Freak believes that kids are afraid of challenge and that any remote difficulty spike would make them turn off the game forever and go back to playing Candy Crush or Minecraft or whatever the big trend is.
Pokémon has never been a difficult game but anyone claiming the games are exactly the same now as 20 years ago is lying to themselves, the design philosophy has shifted heavily since RBY. Things like handholding and railroading (which is not just the act of being linear but in preventing people from walking off the beaten path for even a second) have amplified with each generation, because Game Freak believes that today's kids are incapable of becoming engaged with a video game.
If you want a direct way to compare whether Pokémon games are getting easier or not, you just need to compare games that have been remade to their remakes. RBY and FRLG is mostly unchanged with only a few extra nudges here and there, but GSC and HGSS have some heavy changes, the most egregious being forcing the player to encounter Ho-Oh/Lugia before they can challenge the Elite Four instead of them being optional, and RSE to ORAS is a fucking disaster that completely decimates the semi-linear exploration of RSE in favor of holding the player by the hand at every possible opportunity. Some people will deny this because they don't want it to be true, and there's nothing wrong with liking the handholdy newer games, but it really is easier now than before.
