>>53194381difficulty select, at the end of the day it is a kids game, this is the only way it will be allowed to be harder
I dislike the whole XP / leveling system. I'd probably swap it out in favor of something like EV training on steroids, where part of the stats come from the mon's battle experience, and part comes from the trainers battle experience. that way you can 'spec' a mon into something but at the same time you as an experienced trainer are able to handle a new pokemon well instead of needing to grind it up for 10 hours
then for difficulty you just scale opponent "intelligence", team size, moves. also harder trainers could have gimmicks like trying to set up weather, trying to poison you, crit builds, etc
