If you want to make a singleplayer Pokemon game challenging, you inherently NEED to put the player at a disadvantage, but from my experience most hacks/fangames only manage this in the earlygame where your options are limited, after you get access to alot of optiond the difficulty drops hard because the bosses lose the advantages they had over you

I think alot of people don't get this which is why they complain when bosses have access to moves/mons/abilities/field effects you don't

But it's literally impossible to make an RPG, or any game even, challenging while putting the player and the enemies on an even playing field. Technically there are AIs that can beat the player, but only if it's a game where near instant reaction time and inhumanly fast calculations beat real intelligence and strategy like chess or fighting games. There's no AI that can outsmart the player in situations it can't brute force calculate, and the player has access to countless teams and strategies to counter the AI's team which is limited and predictable, this means if the player and the bosses are at an even playing field in terms of what they have, the player is actually at an extreme advantage

Any other hacks or fangames other than Radical Red that avoid the earlygame being the hardest part?