I've beaten all the 3DS mainline games sans USUM (which I actually fell asleep playing and never touched again), but never gave the DS games a shot because I thought pokemon was lame as a kid. Eventually I strayed away from Pokemon again and played real RPGs. Now that I'm older, I decided to try out HG, since everybody kept talking about how the GBA/DS era games were the best and actually had difficulty.
Playing it, I'm having a lot of fun, but I'm wondering if the 3DS games trained me to play the wrong way? As I progress through the game, I make sure I fight every trainer I can so I earn as much money and EXP as I can, and usually whatever wild mons I run into on the way (but sometimes i outright run). Fighting gym leaders and sometimes regular trainers is real tough though; I often find myself vastly underleveled and constantly out of money for healing items, and checking my team's stats in a save editor, I found that they all had the absolute worst IVs: all had one or two in the single digits, and none ever reached over 23. I edited them to make it a bit fairer, I didn't wanna waste my time trying to catch n train ones with better IVs, but I didnt outright max them out since I still wanted a challenge obviously.
Still though, I found that my team would die extremely quickly to vastly overleveled NPC trainers all the time, so I thought, what, do I just grind wild pokemon forever? Do I really have no other choice? "That's boring will take forever," I thought, so I gave myself a bunch of rare candies to sparingly use when I'm in a situation where I've exhausted all my strategies and think my only remaining option is to grind to a higher level. And then I gave myself a couple extra heals so I'm not stupidly broke.
This bothers me; At this point, even if I'm not outright steamrolling everything, and giving myself some challenge, am I even playing correctly? (Cont)