>>53208188The game trying to give you a challenge without being impossibly hard is bad design now?
The way the level curve is setup means that there are two main challenges throughout the story, which are the elite 4 (level 40-50 while the player is level 30-40) and red (level 77-81 while the player is level 50-60). There are other challenges in the game like whitney, clair, blue, or silver but they're not overlevelled at all.
Both cases make total sense given what they are meant to represent, and yet are still beateable without grinding if the player has a good strategy (red can even be beaten with level 5 mons). At most, you could complain that it takes a long time to match red's pokemon levels, but that's exactly the point - he has been training there for years without talking to his mom, he better have an impressive team to show for it. If you raise the level curve to match the players level with his he doesn't look mpressive at all (like the fiasco that was diatha as a champion), and if you max out red's level to preserve the difficulty you make it impossible for less talented players to outgrind him.
While there are problems with gen 2, the level curve isn't one of them (even though it would be nice for the game to adjust the levels dynamically)
