I heard that apparently masuda designed Ruby and Sapphire to be on the harder side compared to his other games, so I decided to test that out, and honestly? Yea, sorta. It doesn't seem that way looking at the basic ass movesets for boss trainers on bulbapedo but something I'm really realizing now that I'm actually playing is that's definitely balanced out by the lack of any gamebreakingly good pokemon. I just beat winona and I was still working with a team of mostly first evos because all the hard hitters in this gen don't evolve until way later. Not that there aren't ANY mind you, gyarados still exists, but even in the johto games you can grab shit like heracross, tauros, magmar etc without much fuss, but like in this game the vast majority of your options are working with middling stats for most of the game, if not the entire game.
What are you're thoughts on this?