>>42244505I have a few thoughts on difficulty in Pokemon games.
There are two main levers I see that Gamefreak can adjust to make the game harder or easier. The first is obviously the individual difficulty of the trainers you fight. The second has to do with attrition and wearing down your team as you go through a cave or a dungeon or whatever. I think that historically, Pokemon has leaned more heavily towards attrition and wearing your team down over a long series of pretty easy fights. In more recent games, I've noticed that they don't really do this anymore in favor of a few pretty hard bosses, like Leon or Lusamine, which were in all fairness, pretty hard fights.
I don't really have a problem with this change in approach. I would rather a few truly difficult fights rather than slog through a dungeon of bullshit. Unfortunately we don't get enough of these fights that actually require you to think, at least during the main storyline. Leon was the only fight during the main story who actually made me try. The gym leaders could be and should be much harder to compensate for the lack of dungeons and the fact that you don't really go through any grinder before you fight them in this game.
