>>47828890Not enough people ever talk about the shitty Battle Agency from USUM. It's basically a shittier version of the Battle Factory from the Battle Frontier.
How did they fuck up the Battle Factory formula? You start at "grade 0" and work your way up to "grade 50." Like the Battle Factory, you rent Pokémon. But you rent just a single Pokémon out of a random selection of 3.
As you go up in grade levels, that Pokémon's level goes up by 1 per grade level (so from lv. 50 to 100). All battles are 3v3 single battles and the AI's level matches yours. Now here's where it gets really shitty.
As I mentioned, these battles are 3v3. Where do the other 2 Pokémon come from? Random plaza guests in your Festival Plaza! And odds are that most of them probably never even touched the Battle Agency, so you're not going to have a fun time when your partners are 10+ levels below the AI. I feel like they were really banking on a lot of people playing with this feature.
I somehow managed to get to grade 50 on both my save files for US and UM, but it was mostly thanks to what I assumed were hacked Chinese players that popped up in my festival Plaza because, for whatever reason, they would be a grade 50 trainer with a level 100 Pokémon one day and then a grade 0 player the next (I also noticed that their clothing changed when this happened).
And the big prize for making it to grade 50 in the Battle Agency? The stupid fucking glasses the trainers wear during the Battle Agency battles. It's just sunglasses (rectangular ones for the boys, circular for the girls). The least they could've done was also make it a new stamp in the passport for the completionists.
You also get a few other small prizes along the way from rare candies to bottle caps from defeating bosses (Sophocles/RR Giovanni), but they're like 1-time prizes only since you never go down in grades or need to start over. I think you can keep battling for gold bottle caps, but I don't think it's worth the stress.
