>>48543822I wouldn’t say the old main games were truly difficult per day but more that they had more effort in team design like as
>>4854402, many of Hoenn leaders emerald team actually had various set ups that can put up a decent fight, Candice’s platinum team actually takes advantage of hail to the best it could back when hail had fuck all options, Cynthia had a well made and balanced team that hasn’t been seen at the time since blue, and like flannery emerald team with torkoal, Lenora has a similar thing going with retaliate which can become a base 140 attack in the second gym that absolutely will fuck over almost any Pokémon the player could naturally get at that point in BW. These are just a few examples of the older games having instances of decent team design and actual strategies excluding postgame battle facilities.
The more recent games have next to fuck all of any cases of having interesting and well made teams which is the real issue here with the only exception being the totem battles in gen 7 (and only the totem battles) and Piers (who I’d say is one of the only character in gen 8 that has a decent team as it’s the only one who almost all of his Pokémon actually have usable abilities). Outside of these exceptions, the Kalos NPCs (and by extension ORAS which is worse since their using the inferior RB team rather than emerald) were not balanced to accommodate the moder QOL changes and mega evolution and almost all of the major battles in Galar are either a cakewalk because of the forced exp share or their teams are more designed as cannon fodder to pad time till their super special Dynamax comes in which even then their bloody useless for many reasons that would make this paragraph even longer than it is now.
