Honestly one of the biggest red pills for me has been realizing that the mainlines games (Gens 1-5) aren't actually super duper braindead easy and the people making a giant fuss over it are just masters of the game due to having obsessed over it for like 10+ years.
I've convinced NUMERABLE people that I know to get back into pokemon by playing gens 3-5, all of them incredibly intelligent people, and absolutely every one of them reported having plenty of difficulties while playing.
Face it: the average person doesn't have the entire type chart and every mons Base stats + movepool memorized. They don't know where every single pokemon and item is either. And when you go into fights not knowing what to expect, with whatever you happen to be using, you're not gonna plow through the game in quite the same manor as many of you anons who know what you're doing by now. Like, my friend is literally a STEM major and he was grinding his teeth a few days ago trying to beat Wattson in emerald, clearly the older games had an edge to their difficulties. The fact that anons will reply to this with
>Bro just build your team to perfectly counter every battle and always spam healing items and then the game is brain dead easy bro
and
>Bro just completely forgo using any other pokemon and just steamroll with you're starter to win as efficiently as possible
Is a testament to the fact that the games required effort to beat
If this thread goes straight to page 10 I'll assume you all read it and acknowledged it for the sheer facts that it is