It is the eternal question of having to appeal to utterly opposite sides; the kids who may be entering the series with a given game, and players who have played these games often enough that they could make self-playtested ROM hacks and might not be able to relate to how other people see the games anymore.
Coming from the latter mindset? Play through the game as someone who has played through a Pokemon title before, and under the assumption they will have most of a full team by the fourth gym badge (in fact, build your Pokemon appearances and world design AROUND that assumption, if I may insist). What levels will their Pokemon be if they fight every trainer, and make any use of the available TMs? If you can broadly gauge that, enough to get an idea of the player's options, you can build bosses that can be entertaining- not stone walling, just more substantial fight- to fight for those people. Then you can liberally scale back from there if anything is clearly too strong or specific to counter.
Oh, and throw a stronger counter to each of the fully evolved starters later in the game, just for funsies. Watching Swampert-sweepers without ice beam getting thrown out by Sidney's Cacturne was perversely funny.
That requires a complete and bug-tested game to pin down, though, and Game Freak likely doesn't have time for it.
>>34895149It's either too easy to cheese, or a flat wall, yes. I think the point isn't to fix that so much as to make a game that lets the player appreciate their options. I'm torn on Shift/Set. Items are a way to work around level gaps, and I don't reject them on their face; say I'm being smashed by a special attacker and need to resuscitate my answer Pokemon- suddenly choosing Hypno as my psychic type pays game-winning dividends.
