>>43608097He's not saying self-imposed challenges are bad. He's lamenting the fact that the only way to have any challenge is to self-impose one (or in Pokémon's case, several). Look at Zelda 1 and people who do no sword challenges. Zelda 1 still has challenge even with the sword, the self-imposed challenge just exacerbates it and is for skilled veteran players.
I'm not saying that Pokémon has to be hard, but the series sure seems to try its hardest to make sure every player, regardless of experience, age, skill level, etc., will have a very smooth time without any bumps. Pokémon is already a turn-based JRPG, which requires no time-restricted actions on the part of the player. This allows it to not be physically demanding. But the problem is they don't take any advantage of the genre in terms of gameplay. On the contrary, they try to make the game feel like the lowest common denominator of simplistic gameplay.
The one time Pokémon included a hard mode, they made it extremely obtuse to access so as not to add the risk that a mentally and physically challenged child that has not played video games before accidentally accesses it. But apparently its existence is too much.
